Carbides for Future Fission Environments (CAFFE)

Summary (4000 characters)

This project will bring together eight investigators from world leading research and nuclear research universities together with three post-doctoral fellows and three PhD students to investigate zirconium carbide ceramic materials for their potential application in advanced nuclear reactor systems. These materials will be required to operate at high temperatures and suffer large numbers of atomic displacements due to radiation damage and yet will be required to resist corrosion and provide longer lifetimes than current materials. Following recommendations from international reports on the development of new materials for advanced fission reactors, the most modern techniques in materials modelling and characterisation and testing will be brought to bear on these new materials. Phase diagrams will be calculated for new proposed layered zirconium carbide ceramics to guide the preparation of new phases. These new phases and a few already known phases will be characterised on multiple scales with 13C nuclear magnetic resonance, transmission electron and synchrotron diffraction and lab-based x-ray tomography both before and after their irradiation and corrosion testing at the National Nuclear Users Facility/Dalton Cumbria Facility. The researchers will collaborate with leading players in the nuclear materials industry to evaluate the neutronics and manufacturability of these new materials to assess their potential to be carried forward to later stages of development. An international meeting will be hosted at the end of the programme to highlight progress made in the development of these materials to both to the wider industry and to international academic groups to increase the profile of the UK Nuclear Materials community in Generation IV and Generation III+ nuclear research.