NPRE research on the irradiation tolerance of advanced structural materials has secured funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Programs (NEUP). The program also will support NPRE with a grant for research and instructional infrastructure.
Department Head Jim Stubbins and Prof. Brent Heuser will lead NPRE’s share of the materials work, awarded $800,000 over three years. Stubbins and Heuser will be joined in the award by their collaborators, Prof. Peter Hosemann of the University of California-Berkeley and Dr. MeiMei Li of Argonne National Laboratory.
The project will examine the irradiation performance of two classes of advanced steels that have shown good mechanical properties performance.
“The research is aimed at using accelerated irradiation damage experiments with ion beams to help predict the behavior of the materials when used in a nuclear reactor neutron irradiation environment,” Stubbins said. “The predicted behavior will be used to design future in-reactor irradiation testing experiments. The ion irradiation approach allows for highly accelerated damage accumulation but has the drawback that the damage rates and alloy activation issues are much different.”
The infrastructure grant, worth $191,000, will provide equipment funds for three projects.
In the first, Heuser will develop an in situ steam delivery system so that the corrosion process in Zircaloy and other cladding materials can be studied in a new Environmental Transmission Electron Microscope on the Urbana campus. This work will support the on-going international damage-tolerant cladding programs that Heuser leads.
The second is for purchasing a special neutron detection system that operates on the principal of the phase transition of a supercooled gel when irradiated with neutrons. A collaboration faculty member at Yale and the University of Pisa developed these high sensitivity neutron detectors that will support the current research work of NPRE Assistant Prof. Clair Sullivan.
The third part of the award is to extend Stubbins’ high temperature corrosion and mechanical properties testing laboratory facilities.