Grainger VIP Impact Report

GRAINGER INSTITUTE FOR ENGINEERING NAMED FACULTY POSITIONS

ADRIEN COUET Associate Professor Department of Engineering Physics

My research group — MADCOR (Materials Degradation under Corrosion and Radiation) — focuses on the study of complex degradation phenomena of materials subjected to corrosion and/or irradiation in extreme environments, such as advanced nuclear reactors with higher temperatures and radiation fields. Along with renewable energies, advanced nuclear reactors have been identified as a critical technology to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change. However, materials are subjected to corrosion due to molten salts, liquid metals, or high-temperature gases, as well as intense irradiation environments. This past year, my group has developed novel methods of high-throughput irradiation and corrosion testing and their coupling to artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Seminal manuscripts have been published in Nature Communications and Matter , two high-impact journals. I have also secured a large grant from Schmidt Futures to develop a novel platform for the accelerated discovery of materials for fusion applications. While using high-throughput techniques has invaluable benefits to alloy design, it is also critical to understanding fundamental degradation mechanisms, and I have new projects starting on this topic. In particular, I secured a large grant from the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program to study the effects of metallic nano-precipitates on the transport of charged species through oxides. After the MADCOR group joined the Energy Frontier Research Center for Moten Salts in Extreme Environments (at Brookhaven National Laboratory), multiple members of the MADCOR group were awarded beamtime at the National Synchrotron Light Source II to perform novel in situ experiments in molten salts. Finally, the MADCOR group has published 16 papers in peer-reviewed journals since May 2022.

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