NUCLEAR MATERIALS RESEARCH AT UNLV

Dr. Ajit Roy
Mechanical Engineering
University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)

Materials play a vital role in numerous energy applications including oil and gas, geothermal system and nuclear power plants.  Significant efforts are ongoing to develop a national geologic repository to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel and defense high-level waste.  Simultaneously, a concept known as transmutation is being explored under the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative (AFCI) to transform long-lived isotopes into species with relatively short half-lives and reduced radioactivity through capture and decay of minor actinides and fission products.  The waste package container materials and the transmutation target structural materials may undergo degradations under the operating conditions.  Further, they may experience plastic deformation at elevated temperatures.  Environment-induced degradations and plastic deformation may also be experienced by the structural materials in the heat exchangers used during nuclear hydrogen generation involving thermochemical cycle and electrolysis at elevated temperatures.  This presentation will be focused on the high-temperature deformation, and environment-induced degradations of numerous high-performance metals and alloys using state-of-the-art experimental techniques.  Characterization of residual stresses generated in these materials due to cold deformation and welding, by destructive and nondestructive methods, will be covered.  Metallographic and fractographic evaluations of the tested specimens by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy will also be presented.

About the Speaker

Ajit Roy earned his doctoral degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH in 1981.  Subsequently, he spent almost twenty years in corporate and national research laboratories conducting basic and applied research on materials for different energy applications.  He joined the mechanical engineering department at UNLV in 2001.  Currently, he is the principal investigator of six funded research projects, supervising fifteen graduate students.  Professor Roy is an internationally recognized expert in materials engineering and corrosion science with a significant number of journal and conference publications.  He is a member of ANS, ECS, NACE International and ASM International.