Critical experiments for predicting fatigue crack growth behaviour in PWRs

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Fatigue is one of the key degradation mechanisms affecting the integrity of important PWR components. However, metallic fatigue is also a challenge scientific phenomenon that crosses the boundaries of mechanics and materials science. There is a need to conduct critical experiments to gain insight into the microstructural mechanisms at play and assess the influence of different microstructures and environments on the service life of high integrity PWR components.The goal of this PhD project is to conduct mechanical and materials characterisation experiments to shed light into fatigue crack nucleation and growth, including the role of the environment. This includes mechanical testing and also high-resolution characterisation techniques such as EBSD, EDX, and DIC, which will be used to characterize the microstructure, chemistry and stored distortion in crystals, e.g. grain orientation, dislocation density and residual stresses distribution. The student is expected to collaborate closely with a companion computational PhD project.