Awarded the EDF/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Correlative Microscopy for Nuclear Power

I am very grateful to both EDF and the Royal Academy of Engineering for granting me a five year fellowship to allow me to spend more time on our microscopes understanding how materials change inside nuclear reactors - there is a lot of really exciting work ahead of us!

The five-year position, co-sponsored by industry partner EDF Energy, will enable me to expand my research group supporting the latest developments in materials geared towards advancing the past, present, and future of nuclear power.

It’s a real honour to be awarded this fellowship, which will be instrumental in meeting the pressing challenges posed by climate change and energy security. The UK is committed to achieving net zero by 2050, which means it must remove as much greenhouse gas from the atmosphere as it emits. Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, are a vital part of this transition but present fluctuations in supply are resulting in reliance on natural gas.

Nuclear power, which produces around the same amount of carbon as solar and wind, currently accounts for between 15% and 20% of our energy. But the existing fleet of gas-cooled nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their operational life and will all close in the coming years. For new reactor construction and exciting advanced fission and fusion designs, materials research is essential, and it’s great to be at the forefront of such important work.

I am Deputy Director of the Interface Analysis Centre (IAC) facility at the University of Bristol. The IAC facility contains a suite of advanced microscopes used by my research team to understand how components in nuclear reactors change over time. This includes a plasma-focused ion beam providing 3D analysis of how the structures in a material change at the nano and micro scale, which can predict where a component might fail. 

The materials in a nuclear reactor experience one of the most extreme environments on Earth. Gradually, over years, these components change as they are exposed to high temperatures, stresses, radiation, and corrosive environments in the reactor. We have worked in partnership with EDF for a long time to help understand how the materials in the reactor evolve during operation. Our research has helped extend the life of the gas-cooled reactor fleet by more than a decade, resulting in billions of pounds of clean electricity on the UK grid. This fellowship will allow us to grow our collaboration with EDF, providing material insights to extend the life of existing reactors safely, support the construction of new reactors, and better understand future challenges.

Awarded the IOM3 Cook/Ablett award!

So while I begin to setup my life here in Bristol, creating lecture courses, setting up research projects and catching up with old friends, I received some unexpected but pleasant news.

A paper I published a year or so ago has won an award from IOM3, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. The award is the 2017 Cook/Ablett award for publication of particular merit in the field of metals, which is a long but gratifying name!

The paper in question is one I wrote on the use of atom probe tomography to analyse the chemistry of interfaces between phases in metal alloys for aircraft. Atom probe tomography, the technique I specialised in at the University of Oxford, allows us to look at how the chemistry of a material changes on the atomic scale, and for applications like aircraft engines, even the slightest change in the amount of a particular element at the boundary of two phases can dramatically change how it responds under stress and at high temperatures.

A figure from the paper - the red surface is a Laves phase particle (mostly tungsten and molybdenum) in a maraging steel, and the green surfaces are smaller nickel-aluminium rich beta-phase particles. In this case, the Laves phase has grown bigger as the beta particles have precipitated, meaning that the interface between the Laves and matrix is complicated with different concentration profiles from the two positions marked by arrows.

It's always gratifying to get recognition for the work we do as scientists - and this is a paper where we really went in-depth on the nitty-gritty of analysing atom probe data, so the publicity it got will hopefully get people thinking about how they do their analysis. My thanks go to my co-authors, in particular Baptiste Gault (now at MPIE), who did a lot of the awesome simulation work. 

Science continues...

The last touches are being put on my two novels, and the game they tie into, Maelstrom's Edge. Much more to come on that in a few weeks time, including details of the Kindle release.

In the meantime, there's plenty of work to be done at my day job at the University of Oxford. I've had one new paper published in the last few months, in Applied Physics Letters. APL is a journal I tried (and failed) to publish in during my PhD, so it's nice to finally see something with my name on it in that prestigous journal!

The paper is using the atom probe machine that I run at Oxford to look at the distribution of indium in InGaN/GaN quantum wells. Quantum wells are one of the most significant applications of quantum mechanics used in the real world, where they are used in LEDs. Thin layers of a doped semiconductor, in this case Indium Gallium Nitride, are sandwiched between another layer (Gallium Nitride here) with a different band gap. By restricting the width of the doped layer to a few tens of nanometres, you can confine the carrier electrons or holes so that they can only release energy at a certain wavelength. This means with the right well dimensions, when you apply an electric field they will emit a specific colour of light, perfect for LEDs.

The atom probe in my lab allows us to study these materials at the atomic level, to see exactly how the layers of InGaN are distributed. In this case, we wanted to look at two different orientations of the wells, and found that in one growth plane, the Indium is very evenly distributed throughout the wells, whilst in the other direction, clustering of In occurs that can have degrade the performance of the device.

I have another more technical paper on this work due to be published in Microscopy and Microanalysis soon. I'm working on a bunch of other papers at the moment which should be submitted soon, to reduce my backlog of data from last year. Once these three papers are submitted, I can move on to working on some exciting new experiments, such as fossils and meteorites!

In other news, I was very honoured to be selected as the David Cockayne Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College starting in October this year. Belonging to an Oxford college as a fellow is a great honour and will allow me to mingle with some very distinguished colleagues as well as eat some tasty dinners!

New role as editor of Materials Today Communications

Although I'm continuing to work as lab manager at the Atom Probe group in the department of materials in Oxford University, and work on my top secret writing project (which is almost at the point that I can start talking about it!), I've also taken on a smaller new responsibility recently, which is quite exciting.

I am now Managing Editor for the scientific journal Materials Today Communications. This is a journal setup by Elsevier to act as a conduit for papers across the entire range of Materials Science. It's an innovative project, and the idea is interesting one.

Scientific journals these days are extremely oversubscribed, with many of them receiving hundreds or even thousands more papers and articles than they can publish. Whilst some of these articles are turned away by editors or during peer review, many are still presenting good science and are worthy of publication, but there just isn't enough space. Some of the journals with the highest impact factors turn away as much as 80% of submissions!

 Materials Today Communications is intended to be a solution for this problem. Scientific articles submitted to other Elsevier journals that go through peer review and are considered good science, but cannot fit into the intended journal, will be referred to me at  Materials Today Communications, and published there instead, should the authors accept this transfer. This means the authors do not need to reformat their article and resubmit to another journal, and that the process of peer review is not unnecessarily repeated in the new venue. 

My role as managing editor is overseeing the transfer process and ensuring that authors have revised their manuscripts according to the changes recommended by peer review. It's a part time role that will scale depending on how many papers accept their transfers, but it's really nice to have the opportunity to combine the two parts of my life - writing and science. 

Hopefully more on my creative writing work soon - I've been working really hard on it for the last couple of years but it's all still under wraps - but there's so much cool stuff to show people when we finally get the ok to go public!

Reading: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
Listening To: An Ocean Beneath the Waves by The War on Drugs
Watching: Boyhood by Richard Linklater