In water-cooled nuclear reactors zirconium alloys have been the material of choice to encapsulate the fuel due to a combination of low neutron cross-section, excellent corrosion performance and good mechanical properties. However, fuel cladding performance, or our ability to predict its performance, remains the limiting factor in an effort to push for increased fuel burnup, i.e. the energy...
The thermal evolution in metals plays an utmost important role in thermo-mechanical processing. Lattice expansion not only reveals conventional thermal expansion but moreover gives insight to order parameters, change of chemical composition and pressure. Peak widths reveal microstructural changes, as well as texture evolution, while primary extinction can be used to study defect mechanisms....
The demand for Pb-free solder interconnections that can operate reliably at high service temperatures has motivated the development of transient liquid phase (TLP) bonding as an alternative soldering method. The capability of TLP bonding to be processed at a lower temperature while creating a joint composed of high melting temperature intermetallic compounds (IMCs) makes it a promising method....
During the soldering process and the daily operation of the electronic devices, solder alloys experience temperature variation frequently. The mismatch in volume expansion of the solder alloys and the interconnected components can result in stresses which lead to failure. In a solder alloy system with high solubility of one element in another, the effects of thermal expansion and temperature...
Conventional Integrated Circuits (IC) are highly sensitive to radiation effects and can operate only in environments with a very low level of radiation. High radiation environments such as space need custom-designed ICs with dedicated radiation-hardened architectures. Our research is focused on the development and test of radiation-hardened ICs in nanoscale and ultra-low-power semiconductor...
The UOW-ANSTO Seed Funding program is an initiative aimed at encouraging new collaborations between researchers at the University of Wollongong and ANSTO - bringing together teams with diverse and complementary skillsets to tackle questions that require multi-disciplinary approaches.
In 2019, a team of researchers from ANSTO's Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (ACNS), UOW's Australian...
Layer-wise addition of metal to directly form components or add coatings via laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) or laser directed energy deposition (DED) can generate very high levels of residual stress which affect component durability if not adequately addressed. These techniques also result in novel, non-equilibrium microstructures, sometimes with desirable features, that interact with...
High entropy alloys (HEAs) have gained significant attention over the past decade from both academic and industrial communities due to their unique design concept and promising properties. The manufacturing of this emerging material with desired properties remains challenging. Most of previous work utilized conventional vacuum arc melting and casting methods for producing HEAs. However, the...
The Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering at ANSTO has several instruments available for materials science and engineering applications. The instruments have a unique non-destructive ability to determine critical imperfections assist performance of engineering apparatus via radiography and tomography, measure internal residual stresses and textures in crystalline materials, such as metals,...
