Sarah Cole, an incoming freshman, and Alex Nadermann, a visiting summer student, recently presented their research at the Idaho Conference for Undergraduate Research (ICUR).
Sarah spent her senior year of high school working a few hours a week in the AML, and she plans to join Boise State this fall. She shared a poster on her research titled “Characterizing the sensing performance of additively manufactured in-pile strain gauges in high humidity environments.” Additively-manufactured (AM) strain gauges would allow nuclear reactor operators to accurately monitor fuel rod conditions and advanced the safety and reliability of the nuclear industry. Sarah’s research focused on mechanical testing of these strain gauges inside an environmental chamber to evaluate sensor performance in high humidity conditions. The study demonstrated the accurate sensing performance of AM capacitive strain gauges at low levels of relative humidity and mechanically imposed strain. Download and view the full-size poster.
Alex joined the AML through the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which allows students from smaller universities to spend 9 weeks doing research at a university with a research program. Alex spent the summer working on surrogate fuels, and presented a poster titled, “Synthesis and characterization of doped CeO2 as a surrogate nuclear fuel.” During his 9 weeks at BSU, Alex researched the synthesis and characterization of additives, which included manganese dioxide and titanium dioxide, to cerium dioxide as a surrogate nuclear fuel. The goal of the project was to obtain a large grain size with low porosity, to increase the performance of ceramic fuels in light water reactors. After adding the dopants in different quantities, Alex used x-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and inductively-coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS) to analyze the resulting composition and grain size of each sample. He found that CeO2 samples doped with 800 ppm of MnO2 and sintered at 1550°C showed the most consistent increase in grain size. Download and view the full-size poster.
