Find out about the people who work at UKAEA

How long have you been at UKAEA for?

I’ve been at UKAEA for nearly six years. I joined in the summer of 2017, starting as a EUROfusion Engineering Fellow in a three-year position, working on a project to characterise irradiation damage in fusion relevant materials. Following on from that, I had a relatively short period as a Materials Scientist working at the Materials Research Facility.

I then took on a more group leader type of role, in terms of looking after people in the team. When the previous person left that was when I officially became the Active Materials Testing Lead, so I’ve been in my current position since February 2021.

Tell me about your role

I work in the Materials Research Facility (MRF) at UKAEA, which is a place we have for testing radioactive material. In my role we specifically test radioactive material because we’re interested in what’s happened after things have been irradiated. We’re primarily interested in the damage that occurs specifically from neutrons, which are produced from the fusion reaction between deuterium and tritium.

The neutrons produced from the fusion reaction carry energy, which is useful for making electricity, but they can also cause damage in the material and transmutation (when elements change from one into another). The transmuted elements tend to be unstable which means the irradiated materials become radioactive. The exposure to radiation changes our materials and properties, which necessitates looking at the irradiated material.

At the MRF we look at materials for fusion mainly, but also for fission and for particle accelerators because there’s a lot of commonalities between those three areas. Within the MRF we have shielded facilities to enable the sample preparation and scientific investigation of radioactive materials.

On a day-to-day basis, my role involves overseeing a team of 16 people and coordinating all the MRF processes. This includes sample transport and receipt, sample preparation, scientific analysis, and reporting of the data.

What do you enjoy the most about working at UKAEA?

There’s been lots of things over the years, but in my current role what I enjoy is seeing the whole materials lifecycle. From interacting with the material scientists who are coming up with new materials or approving them, to arranging transport for the irradiated materials so that we can test them and demonstrate how they get better or worse. Finding out new things through the investigation, which can lead onto coming up with fresh ideas and newfound ways of testing - such as, how can we use smaller volume of materials, rather than conducting big tests that use up a lot of material.

Currently we’re looking at new methods that use smaller volumes, or effectively more intelligent tests to get more information out of the limited volume of material. For fusion and fission, to some extent, we’re never going to have lots of irradiated material from reactor relevant environments. That’s why I really enjoy the challenge of using the material we do have in a better way.

Tell me about a recent project you’ve been involved in

I’m the principal investigator for the FaSCiNATe project, which is part of the National Nuclear User Facility which was established to support the Governments investment in the UK’s future of sustainable energy sources. Part of what the FaSCiNATe project is all about is establishing a facility for looking at the temperature effects of irradiated materials. The new equipment is all about adding to our capability to be able to interrogate materials that have been irradiated and what happens to them as a function of temperature.

We were granted funding for the investment of three new pieces of equipment. They are the differential scanning calorimeter (DSC), which looks at the energy in irradiation-created defects in materials that have been irradiated. The X-ray diffractometer (XRD), measures the the strain in the crystal around those defects, and the in situ mechanical tester which we can use to probe the small-scale mechanical properties that occur and the changes in these properties because they’ve been irradiated and contain defects.

All these three things are focused on characterising these defects in different ways. They’re complimentary methods that are focused on looking at things on the small scale, making the most out of the limited amount of material available to us.

In April we held a successful user engagement workshop for external delegates who were wanting to find out more about how to use these techniques to investigate materials that they’re interested in. Or who have experience in the kind of testing and science that we want to do.

We had a morning of technical talks with speakers including myself, as well as several external speakers from the University of Manchester, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and University of Michigan. Followed by tours and discussion in the afternoon, all of which seemed to be very well received by those in attendance. It was also a great knowledge sharing opportunity for the MRF, as it was one of our first forays into working directly with some of these other established research organisations who are working on similar to things to us.

As a user facility we’re open for industry and academia to use the equipment, and for a limited time we’re offering free access for relevant projects on a trial basis. If you would have any questions or would like more information, please email info@mrf.ukaea.uk.