In a new piece for the Innovation News Network, NPRE professor James Stubbins details how technology is allowing us to ‘look inside’ irradiated steels to determine the durability of a nuclear structure.
"One of the founding principles in materials science is that the internal microstructure of a material controls the material performance," Stubbins writes. "Because of this, there has always been an intense interest in studying and classifying the internal structures in materials as a means of understanding and predicting their performance. Most of this work has been aided by the continuing and rapidly advancing development of microstructural analysis techniques to probe smaller and smaller regions of the material structure, down to the atomistic level.
"The atomistic level information is critical to understand the internal changes in the material. However, the major challenge is to link that understanding to the performance of realistic-scale materials structures. We have been interested in building, on the atomistic level, information to understand how actual structures behave under real-life application conditions – can we understand the durability of a structure from our atomistic-level materials characterisation?"
You can read the full article here: https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/looking-inside-irradiated-steel/32595/