Laser-accelerated patricle beams for stress testing of materials (market study)

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In the last decades, strong effort is put into the advanced manufacturing of materials for very specific applications. Part of these applications use materials exposed to harsh conditions such as when exposed to high-energy density fluence, e.g. in high-energy density/astrophysics, aero spatial applications (including aircraft industry), or energy production. Testing the stress of these materials before they go into production is of vital importance if one wants to ensure a safe operation of the system and prevent failures that can have devastating consequences. Currently, material stress tests simulated in laboratories are based on the irradiation of materials with high energetic (conventional) particle beams, which simulate the deposited energy and the displacements per atoms (dpa) of a testing material. A drawback of these methods is their long implementation time, associated with higher costs and long waiting times, and their limit in reproducing the real time scenario for some very specific applications. This proposal aims at performing a market study related to development and commercialization of a new Material Stress-testing technique based on laser-accelerated protons. Laser-based proton acceleration has the advantage of having a much shorter bunch length (typically it is ps at the source), a very high flux (typically 10e13 particles per bunch) and a large particle energy spectrum (ranging up to a few MeV). We have shown that these properties allow the laser-generated particles to induce a much higher stress into the materials since the short bunch duration does not allow the material for recovery. As such, using this novel source allows for different improvements such as being 1) much faster, since it can be performed with a few single sub-ps laser-shots; 2) more efficient, since it is able to reproduce a considerable typical operational time of the material in harsh environment (e.g. reactor) in a much shorter time; 3) more compact and more accessible; 4) more versatile, since it allows stress tests in various conditions, including those that are difficult or even impossible to reproduce by conventional methods. We strongly believe that a market study for this new technology is extremely timely and will contribute to foster innovation.**