Studying the Deformation of Tungsten and its Alloys During Mechanical Testing with analysis being performed using EBSD and HR-DIC Methods

This project looks at the materials used in a fusion reactor particularly in the divertor which is designed to withstand extremely high heat fluxes and highly energetic neutron bombardment and as such tungsten is the leading candidate material choice. Research is currently being undertaken to understand tungsten's fundamental mechanical property behaviour as it suffers from acute brittleness and a high brittle-to-ductile transition temperature. Alloying tungsten with elements such as rhenium is often the strategy to improve its ductility; however, rhenium is also a transmutation product that can form precipitates under reactor conditions exacerbating the embrittlement of the alloy. Therefore, other alloying options need to be explored. This project is looking at novel tungsten alloys for fusion reactor divertor application. This is coupled with gaining an understanding at the microstructural level the behaviour under tensile loads and how this is impacted by different alloying elements and microstructures with a potential extension of examining either the impacts of radiation or hydrogen isotope loads. The primary techniques that I am interested in are scanning and transmission electron microscopy, with a particular interest in high resolution digital image correlation to understand the deformation mechanisms of the different alloys at the near atomic scales. This will help link the local microstructure to the mechanical response. Ex-situ testing will also be carried out on pure tungsten to acquire a set of "baseline" values for its mechanical properties. The main objective is to obtain the ideal novel alloy to be used in such applications.