Mechanical Properties of Materials for Fusion Power Plants Combined Modelling and Experimental Project Home Page  About the Projects  Progress  Positions available  People  Links  Private area  SGR Group

Materials for fusion power plants provide one of the major structural materials challenges of the next 20 years.

So far, relatively little demand has been made on the properties of the materials used for JET and other prototype reactors, since they had only to contain an operating plasma for very short times. In the next stage of development of fusion reactors (ITER) and particularly in fusion power plants, materials issues will be crucial to success. The first wall will operate at temperatures up to 600ºC, will need to withstand stresses up to 300MPa, and will accumulate over its lifetime radiation damage from fast neutrons amounting to ~100dpa. It is essential that any material used here maintains adequate strength and toughness, while suffering minimal dimensional change through swelling and creep.

Materials currently proposed for this application include ferritic-martensitic steels based on iron ~9% chromium (RAFM steels), vanadium alloys and tungsten.

This research programme is aimed at thorough understanding of the flow and fracture behaviour of bcc metals (vanadium, tungsten, iron), and iron-chromium binaries up to 12% Cr (these form the basis of the RAFM steels). Materials are being studied both in their 'normal' and post-irradiated states. The approach used is to combine a multi-scale modelling project with an experimental programme. The modelling project combines ab-initio modelling, potential development, molecular dynamics, kinetic Monte-Carlo methods and dislocation dynamics. The experiments are yielding data to inform the modelling of radiation damage, plastic flow and fracture and test the predictions made by the models.

The project started in October 2004, and is based at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Edinburgh University, Liverpool University and Queen's University Belfast.

The overall project leader is Professor S G Roberts, Oxford University.

It is supported by EPSRC and UKAEA Culham.

Graduate Studentship available NOW (October 2008) - Materials for Fusion Power Plants