Improved cellular automata modeling of corrosion/oxidation mechanism of stainless steel in LBE

•Novel cellular automata rules are proposed, and an improved cellular automata model is established to investigate the growth and long-term changes of the biphase oxide layer on stainless steel during corrosion in LBE, the theory of interdiffusion of elements is verified.•The simulation results show that the thicknesses of the inner, outer, and total oxide layers follow a parabolic trend with respect to time steps, which is in agreement with Wagner's proposed theory on oxide layer growth.•The improved cellular automata model is verified by mapping the simulation results onto the experiment data of steel in the LBE loop, establishing a preliminary correlation between them.