Precipitation characteristics and growth mechanism of Fe and Cr from liquid lead-bismuth eutectic by quenching in liquid nitrogen

•Fe, Cr, and a mixture of Fe and Cr were added to liquid LBE at 1173 K and cooled with liquid nitrogen to study their precipitation characteristics.•There were three morphologies of precipitates: faceted dendrite, polyhedron (cube, octahedron, and hopper), and seaweed dendrite.•The solid-liquid interface structure and growth mechanism of precipitates were discussed.•The study provides an important reference for the impurity filtering process in the lead-cooled fast reactor (LFR) and the accelerator driven sub-critical (ADS) system.