MIT develops real-time 3D imaging for reactor materials

The MIT News Office has announced that MIT researchers developed a technique enabling real-time, 3D monitoring of corrosion, cracking, and material failure inside nuclear-reactor-like environments using high-intensity synchrotron X-rays.

• Main announcement: MIT researchers (led by Ericmoore Jossou, senior author; lead author David Simonne) demonstrate that adding a silicon dioxide buffer layer between nickel crystals and a silicon substrate and keeping the sample longer under a focused high-intensity X-ray beam causes strain to relax, enabling real-time phase-retrieval 3D imaging of material failure under reactor-like irradiation conditions. The study was published in Scripta Materiala and involved collaborators at European Synchrotron and Synchrotron SOLEIL.
• Background and details: Experiments used solid state dewetting to prepare nickel single crystals and required specialized synchrotron X-rays available at a handful of facilities; only silicon-dioxide-buffered silicon wafers showed the strain-relaxation effect (other substrates like niobium-doped strontium titanate did not). Work was partially funded by the MIT Faculty Startup Fund and the U.S. Department of Energy, and sample prep occurred in part at MIT.nano.