Bradley Young
|
Bradley Young Department of Materials Email: bradley.young@materials.ox.ac.uk
|
Having completed his MEng at the department, Bradley is now researching new zirconium alloys for fusion applications. Zirconium is currently widely used in fission reactors due to its low neutron cross section, this property is equally desirable for the breeder blanket of a fusion reactor. However, the mechanical properties of current alloys, such as Zircaloy-4, will not be sufficient in the fusion environment.
In order to investigate possible alternatives, Bradley will be creating dilute Zr alloys using the plasma arc furnace and then cold-working and ageing samples. Testing, observation and analysis will include optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (including EBSD, EDX and FIB), X-ray diffraction, nanoindentation, and vickers hardness testing. Promising alloys will be exposed to fusion-like conditions to observe behaviour.
The outcome of the research will be to provide insight in to the possible future of zirconium alloys.
Bradley is supervised by Professors Chris Grovenor and David Armstrong and funded by an EPSRC DTP studentship award as part of the MIDAS programme. |
