Speaker
Description
An ISOL facility with a primary beam of up to 500 μA - 100 MeV protons, is currently being designed in SCK CEN (Belgium) to start operation in 2028. Target and ion source research have been, since long, research subjects at SCK CEN in order to develop the radioactive ion beams to be available at ISOL@MYRRHA.
SCK CEN has a unique and varied panoply of laboratories equipped with advanced characterization techniques to study activated/contaminated materials. It is also equipped with hot cells which allow the preparation of samples of highly radioactive materials for characterization and also post irradiation examination. With an emerging ISOL facility with dedicated target material laboratories, SCK CEN is creating a unique environment to potentiate target material research including also post-irradiation characterization studies.
Using some of the mentioned target material research infrastructure, SCK CEN has recently studied TRIUMF’s uranium carbide materials by comparing samples before and after irradiation by characterizing in detail their microstructure complemented with elemental analysis.
At SCK CEN the research on Thorium based materials for radioactive ion beam production has recently been started within a PhD framework, in collaboration also with ISOLDE at CERN.
Non-actinide material experience also exists at SCK CEN: recently, a novel tantalum carbide material was developed in collaboration with KU Leuven from a Ta4AlC3 MAX phase with bimodal porosity and micrometric grain size. This material, even when brought to 2200 °C shows no sign of sintering, demonstrating a very good microstructural stability at extremely high temperatures. Samples have been sent to TRIUMF for radioactive isotope release studies, which are still ongoing.
In this poster, we will give an overview of ISOL target material research involving SCK CEN, but also of the infrastructure and capabilities available at SCK CEN for the characterization of radioactive materials.
