$1M grant from U.S. Department of Energy funds research on alternative processes for reactor shields and other components.
Sougata Roy, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering from Iowa State University has received a $1M grant from the United States Department of Energy to study the possibility of using additive manufacturing to create shields and other components for use in nuclear reactors.
“One of the major things that excites me about this project is working with nuclear energy,” Roy said in a press release. “It’s the largest source of clean power in the United States. This emission-free electricity is important for the future.”
The grant will allow Roy, as the lead researcher, to assemble what he calls a DREAM-TEAM project: “Developing a Robust Ecosystem for Additive Manufacturing of Tungsten for Extreme Applications and Management.”
Joining Roy on the project are Yachao Wang, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of North Dakota, and researchers from three of the U.S. Department of Energy’s labs: Ames National Laboratory on the Iowa State campus, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The grant is part of a $36 million effort by the energy department’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), which is designed to build energy-related research capabilities and expertise across the country.
The researchers will work with tungsten because it maintains strength at high temperatures, has a high melting temperature, resists erosion under high-energy neutron irradiation and retains low levels of radioactive tritium.
Tungsten is typically expensive for conventional manufacturers to work with because it’s hard and brittle, which is why Roy and his team will be 3D printing tungsten-based alloys using laser powder-blown directed-energy deposition. This involves using a laser under oxygen-controlled conditions to process tungsten powder and print the metal layer by layer.
Roy, who has experience 3D printing other steel-based alloys for nuclear energy applications, said the project will allow him to purchase a new instrument to characterize the mechanical properties (including the instrumented indentation characteristics and the fracture toughness) of the printed samples.
Roy said the most unique part of the project isn’t the actual printing, it’s the physics-based modeling and computational simulations of the printing process that will complement the experimental work.
The modeling and simulations, which will include work with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, will help researchers establish the theories behind their experimental results. The simulations will also help them develop recipes for tungsten alloys that can withstand the extreme conditions inside a nuclear reactor.
“We’ll start with pure tungsten,” he said. “Eventually we’ll develop new alloys to resolve the cracking challenge.”
