RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Thermal Analyses of Advanced Nuclear Materials

There is currently great effort within the international nuclear community to develop new nuclear fuels and materials technologies with two broad objectives: A) to enhance safety margins of existing Nuclear Generating Stations (NGS), and B) to support the commercialization of emerging NGS that have yet to become operational. The primary impetus of A is driven by the unfortunate events of Fukushima to develop new Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) technologies, which are intended to be inherently more tolerant in the event of an accident. The motivation for B is to support design and safety assessments of new NGS technologies that differ considerably from conventional reactors, which broadly belong to Generation IV and fusion reactors. This presentation will describe recent developments by the Nuclear Fuels and Materials Group at Ontario Tech University in investigating both objectives enabled by a Netzsch Jupiter 449 F1 Simultaneous Thermal Analyzer. Case studies in Thermo-Gravimetric Analyses (TGA) of ATF technologies, TGA analyses of tritiated graphite tiles from a fusion reactor, and differential scanning calorimetry of fission products in molten salt reactor materials will be discussed.

PRESENTED BY
Markus H.A. Piro
Faculty of Energy Systems and Nuclear Sciences, Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, Canada

Prof Piro is currently a Canada Research Chair in Nuclear Fuels and Materials at Ontario Tech University where he leads a multi-disciplinary team in support of academic and commercial projects. Previously, he was the Head of the Fuel Modelling and Fission Product Transport Section at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories and a Post Doc at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). His primary research interests are in computational thermodynamics, nuclear fuel engineering, multi-scale multi-physics modelling & simulation of nuclear fuels and materials, and experimental & computational fluid dynamics.