Professor Amy Gandy

UK Atomic Energy Authority

About:

Amy is Head of the Materials Science and Engineering Programme in the Materials Division at the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Previously, she held a Leverhulme Trust Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship in Understanding Radiation Damage Mechanisms in Compositionally Complex Alloys (2021 – 2022), was Senior Lecturer in Nuclear Materials Engineering and Henry Royce Technology Platform Lead in Advanced Characterisation to Understand Radiation Damage in Materials (2020 – 2023), Director of Postgraduate Taught Courses (2022 – 2023), and Lecturer in Nuclear Engineering (2015 – 2019) all at the University of Sheffield. She has over 20 years’ experience investigating radiation damage effects in materials, particularly in alloys and ceramics, with a current focus on developing novel materials for fusion power production. Amy’s research centres on using energetic ion implantation to induced damage in materials, electron microscopy, including ion irradiation and thermal annealing in-situ in a TEM, and X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic methods, to characterise the structure of materials, across a range of length-scales, and ion beam induced defect morphologies (radiation damage).

Abstract:
Irradiation effects in solid breeder and plasma facing materials for fusion power production

For sustainable fusion energy to be realised, materials that can withstand the unique fusion environment must be developed. In this contribution, we present our work developing materials for two key components for magnetic confinement fusion: the tritium breeder blanket and plasma facing materials in the first wall. Tritium, a fusion fuel, can be bred via neutron capture of lithium, with concurrent formation of helium. Polycrystalline lithium metatitanate (Li2TiO3) is a candidate solid breeder material, however, helium accumulation at grain boundaries and / or intrinsic defects could have a deleterious effect on the structural integrity of the breeder, as well as impact tritium diffusion and extraction. In this contribution, the effect of helium implantation and post-implantation heating to breeder blanket temperatures in Li2TiO3, in-situ in a transmission electron microscope (TEM), are presented. However, care must be taken when interpreting TEM data from Li2TiO3: in this contribution we also show the formation of nanometre sized vacancy-type defects due to TEM electron beam irradiation at room temperature. Plasma facing materials will be subjected to high flux helium irradiation, produced by the deuterium-tritium fusion reaction. Whilst tungsten is a plasma facing material of choice, new materials that can better withstand plasma erosion and helium induced surface nano-structuring, which could result in plasma contamination and tritium retention, are also being developed. In this contribution, a novel application of helium ion microscopy (HIM) is presented, used to investigate the relationship between alloy crystal structure and composition on low energy helium ion-induced surface nano-structure formation in compositionally complex alloys.

1.UK Atomic Energy Authority, Culham Campus, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 3DB, UK
2.School of Computing and Engineering, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK
3.Ion Beam Centre, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden Rossendor, Germany
4.Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Sheffield, S1 3JD