The Ohio State University Nuclear Reactor Laboratory Receives 4th RTE Award
Recently, The Ohio State University Nuclear Reactor Laboratory (NRL) won its fourth Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) award to fund irradiation services supporting the research of Mr. Josh Jones, a PhD student at OSU, for his proposal “Microstructure characterization of 6Li(n,α)3H reaction damage sapphire claddings”.
The U.S. Department of Energy - Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) NSUF selected 19 new Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) projects, totalling approximately $690,000. The NSUF competitively selected these projects from a pool of high-quality RTE proposals. Each proposal was evaluated based on a variety of factors including technical approach, mission relevance, and scientific-technical merit.
“We appreciate the confidence that researchers place in our facility and staff when they choose to use NRL for their experiments,” said Kevin Herminghuysen, Senior Researcher at NRL. “We are especially happy to see this team of researchers have the importance of their work acknowledged through the RTE award process.”
The goal of this project is to characterize fiber changes from radiation bombardment and subsequent heat treatment. The information gained in this experiment will enable better understanding of the process in order to improve the sapphire fibers’ performance for sensing in nuclear reactors.
Through three previous RTE awards, the NRL has collaborated with researchers from across the country to continue to advance the understanding of irradiation effects in sensor and sensor materials in support of the mission of the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. The NSUF competitively selected these projects based on a variety of factors including feasibility, mission relevance, and scientific-technical merit:
“Neutron Irradiation of Ga2O3 to Identify Native Point Defects” (Leonard Brillson, The Ohio State University)
“Active Irradiation Testing of Temperature Sensing Capability of Clad Sapphire Optical Fibers with Type 2 Bragg Gratings using Optical Backscatter Reflectometry” (Christian Petrie, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
“Transmutation doping of hexagonal boron nitride” (James Edgar, Kansas State University)
As the only operating research reactor currently in the State of Ohio, the NRL is a unique teaching and research laboratory that delivers high quality service to its customers and excellent instruction and research opportunities to nuclear engineering students. In 2017, the DOE designated the NRL as a partner facility of the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program, allowing awarded researchers, often in collaboration with other laboratories and industry, to perform DOE mission-supporting research at the NRL at no cost to users. Experimenters interested in utilizing NRL facilities should e-mail reactor@osu.edu.
