Our undergraduate researcher Bao-Phong Nguyen has been busy this semester! He was selected as a recipient of the Hilldale fellowship for his work on exploring stainless steels and model alloy irradiation response under ion irradiation, but his accomplishments don’t stop there. At the 2023 ANS conference, his presentation on the “High-Throughput Study for Examining Void Swelling Behavior in Ion Irradiated SS304” was selected as the Best Undergraduate Nuclear Fuels and Materials presentation.
As the nuclear industry pushes to increase the pace of advanced material qualification, Bao-Phong believes that high-throughput testing methods may be the answer. “Before we can get to specific compositions that would be good for extreme environments, we need to start with a promising compositional space,” Bao-Phong commented, “High-throughput testing increases the rate we can make these decisions, and the faster we can reach useful alloy compositions, the more rigorously we can test them with confidence for future application.” Bao-Phong hopes to continue on to graduate school after finishing his bachelor’s in Nuclear Engineering in May 2024.