Alexander Craig

Part II Student

Department of Materials
University of Oxford
Parks Road
Oxford OX1 3PH
UK

Email: partII.student@materials.ox.ac.uk

Project description:

For commercially viable nuclear fusion liquid lithium tritium breeder concepts will require a series of coatings to ensure 1) the liquid lithium does not come into contact and react with any underlying metal structure, 2) prevent the diffusion of tritium into underlying materials. These coatings must be mechanically viable with both good adhesion to underlying material and adequate mechanical properties in their own right. It will also be important to understand how these degrade during service due to thermal cycling and irradiation damage. In this work a range of transition metal carbides and/or rare earth oxides will be studied using nanoindentation and nanotribology, thermal cycling and SEM based microscopy. The work will be predominantly experimental but analysis will use matlab codes and potentially some finite element modelling.