Charpagne wins DOE early career award for radical approach to nuclear materials 

Why it matters:  Current nuclear reactor materials gradually fail under radiation exposure. Research from Assistant Professor Marie Charpagne of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, flips the script, using radiation itself to make materials more resilient. 

The big picture: Charpagne received a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Research Program award for her unique approach to radiation damage. 

• Traditional strategies try to slow down or prevent radiation-induced defects from degrading in metallic alloys. 

• Charpagne proposes letting radiation create protective nanostructures that continuously repair damage as it occurs. 

How it works: Her team will study iron-copper-nickel-chromium high entropy alloys that undergo radiation-induced phase separation, a poorly understood phenomenon. 

• The process creates a dense network of "sinks" that eliminate defects before they can clump together and become harmful to the material’s integrity. 

• Unlike in conventional approaches in the field, these structures form spontaneously during operation. 

"This project is one of the most daring declinations of my broader research vision 'metastable alloys by design,' which consists in leveraging extreme environments as an asset (here irradiation by energetic particles) as an integral part of alloy design, instead of trying to combat their effects." - Assistant Professor Marie Charpagne

What's next: Using advanced electron microscopy and nano-mechanical testing, researchers will map how radiation conditions trigger beneficial phase changes, potentially enabling a new class of self-healing nuclear materials. 

The bottom line: For nuclear fission and fusion systems requiring decades of high-temperature operation, designing materials that heal themselves stands as a transformative approach. 

llinois Grainger Engineering Affiliations  

Marie Charpagne is an Illinois Grainger Engineering assistant professor of Materials Science and Engineering and is affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering and the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the Materials Research Laboratory and the Beckman Institute.