Dinakar Sagapuram, Ph.D. from the Texas A&M University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Osman El-Atwani, Ph.D. and Yongqiang Wang, Ph.D. from Materials Science at Radiation and Dynamics Extremes Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are using new metal manufacturing techniques to create stronger materials that have a higher capacity to withstand radiation from nuclear reactors.
Example of metal crystal grains.
Most of the engineering metals used today are polycrystalline, which means that they are made up of many individual crystals or grains packed together. One type is nanocrystalline metals, which have a grain size less than 100 nanometers and are exceptionally strong. They recently became a focus of interest in the nuclear materials community after researchers found that these fine-grained metals have a high irradiation tolerance.