DOE has selected one industry, two DOE National Laboratories, and one university-led project that will take advantage of NSUF capabilities to investigate important nuclear fuel and material applications. DOE will support three of these projects with a total of $1.2 million in research funds. All four of these projects will be supported by more than $3.9 million in facility access costs and expertise for experimental neutron and ion irradiation testing, post-irradiation examination facilities, synchrotron beamline capabilities, and technical assistance for design and analysis of experiments through NSUF.
A complete list of NSUF projects with their associated abstracts is available below.
The objective of this proposed project is to deploy a recently developed fiber-optic-based instrument in the MIT Research Reactor to perform in-pile thermal conductivity measurements of fuels and materials. The design of this instrument is based on the photothermal radiometry. In this method, thermal conductivity is measured by locally heating the sample surface and measuring the transient temperature gradient by collecting infrared black-body radiation.
The project will focus on a systematic study of irradiation effects on emerging ultrawide bandgap Ga2O3 high temperature and radiation-resistant sensor materials through a series of well-designed neutron irradiation and post-irradiation examination (PIE) experiments.
Researchers will study the effect of neutron irradiation and friction stir welding (FSW) on Ni-based oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) MA754 to understand the general trend of microstructural evolution and resulting radiation-hardening, in order to develop appropriate processing-structure-property-dose correlations. Efforts will also be made to compare the neutron irradiation performance of ODS and FSW concepts on Ni-base and Fe-base alloys (MA754 vs. MA956).
The objective of this proposal is to determine how the FeCrAl alloy fabrication route determines the microstructure and mechanical properties following neutron irradiation. FeCrAl alloys are fabricated through conventional melting/forging, additive manufacturing, and powder metallurgy. Irradiation effects on microstructure (irradiation induced defect clusters and precipitation) and the corresponding impact on mechanical properties (hardness and embrittlement) will be evaluated.
