A multidisciplinary consortium of engineers from UK universities Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Salford, Sussex and Huddersfield is looking at ways to forecast the life of nuclear reactors and design materials for a new generation of power stations.
The work will focus on the graphite bricks that form the moderator in nuclear reactors. 'As a result of irradiation these graphite bricks swell, and cracks develop in them. If they need to be replaced then basically the reactors need to be shut down,’ said professor Rik Brydson of Leeds University, who is working on the project.
The moderator's function is to slow down neutrons to speeds most effective for nuclear fission and are permanently under bombardment from high-energy neutrons. Knowing exactly how the material changes and over what timescale will help engineers predict how long the moderators can do their job properly, how manufacturing processes could be improved and how some of the damage to the graphite blocks might be reversed. The project will also inform the design of a new generation of high-temperature reactors.
‘There are two aspects to this: one is keeping the existing fleet going safely in the UK and the other is looking to the whole new set of reactors that are at much higher temperatures and will need to employ graphite more,’ said Brydson.
A key part of the project will be its multidisciplinary approach, bringing together academics from different, but complementary, fields of research.
‘They’re all engineers of one sort or another, but some are very much at the theoretical, atomistic modelling side, right through to people who are looking at engineering components at a mechanistic level,’ Brydson added.
The project, which will run for three years, is being funded by a £1.3m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It will involve around 25 academics, postdoctoral researchers and postgraduate students across the six universities, and key industrial partners from the nuclear industry.
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