Media release

From: Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO)

ANSTO researchers investigate how materials behave in extreme environments providing information that is vital to support the development of Australian industries.

Extreme environments include situations where materials are exposed to a combination of different conditions, including high temperature, radiation, corrosion and mechanical load.

How materials respond in these environments helps to identify what materials are best for certain industrial environments or for example, within a nuclear setting including new nuclear power plants.

“In fact, the technical performance of materials is one of the greatest challenges in improving the safety, efficiency and economic viability of nuclear systems”, said ANSTO Principal research scientist A/Prof Ondrej Muránsky.

However, testing of materials in extreme environments such as a combination of high-temperature, corrosion and radiation is not trivial in laboratory conditions as it requires substantial infrastructure.

ANSTO is home to Australia’s nuclear expertise and operates its only multipurpose reactor OPAL and is ideally positioned to study the behaviour of materials and degradation in extreme conditions combining various in-service environments.

“ANSTO’s research infrastructure and in-house expertise, in particular the work of the Reactor Systems research group, enables us to build a holistic understanding of the fundamental and applied aspects of materials in extreme environments,” said Muránsky.

When studying materials behaviour in extreme environments we need to keep in mind that materials are multiscale systems. Therefore, we need to apply multiscale experimental and numerical techniques to fully understand their degradation and ultimately the failure – from atomistic scale to macroscopic scale.

“Knowing that a piece of material has failed at the macroscopic scale has limited value until you analyse the underlying degradation and failure mechanism which may be occurring to the atomic structure,” said Muránsky.

ANSTO use diffraction (neutron/synchrotron) and various microscopy techniques available at ANSTO to probe a material at different scales in various environments.

This experimental data is then combined with state-of-the-art modelling approaches to simulate a material’s response from the atomic to the macroscopic scale.

A fundamental understanding of the material’s behaviour from experimental data can be used to build and validate physically based, empirical or/and machine learning models, which help to predict the behaviour of materials in extreme in-service operating conditions in a real-world engineering system

ANSTO’s work on building a multiscale understanding of materials behaviour in extreme environments has a multi-industry significance as it is relevant not only to the energy industry, but it is also relevant to defence and emerging space industries. 

Recent work has been on molten salt reactors and their corrosive environment, which also has relevance for the molten salt-based energy storage and transfer systems for solar.