Applications of Additive Manufacturing to Nuclear Material Engineering

Additive manufacturing is an emerging technology that has many key advantages such as lower lead times for part fabrication, greater design flexibility, economic viability, and enhanced performance. The materials and structural components made by additive manufacturing exhibit various extraordinary physical and mechanical properties in harsh working environments, therefore opening up new opportunities for the nuclear energy sector in which materials developed nearly half a century ago are still being employed.

However, the complete adoption of additive manufacturing in the nuclear energy sector is hindered by the unavailability of codes and standards, as well as a limited understanding of materials performance in the specific nuclear environments. There is also a need to improve the qualification and testing procedures specific to the additive manufacturing of nuclear materials. To surmount these challenges, it is essential to explore new and existing materials via multiple available additive manufacturing techniques to acquire, analyze, and compare the relevant material property data. To this end, the integration of additive manufacturing techniques with computational sciences can aid in rapidly producing, analyzing, and down selecting the materials for nuclear environments with substantial ease.

This Research Topic therefore welcomes submissions focused on developing, understanding, and qualifying additively manufactured materials for nuclear applications.

Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Characterization of microstructure and properties of additively manufactured materials, such as mechanical properties, failure mechanisms, corrosion, oxidation, and irradiation response
• Design of new materials with enhanced performance using additive manufacturing
• Advanced characterization approaches to rapidly qualify/investigate additively manufactured materials for simulated and in-situ environments
• Modeling process-structure-property-performance relationships for additively manufactured materials
• Understanding the effect of process parameters on the microstructure and performance of additively manufactured materials
• Modelling and characterization of macro- and micro- residual stress induced by additive manufacturing
• Modelling of additively manufactured microstructures for process parameter optimization
• Simulating the performance of additively manufactured materials in nuclear energy environments to establish model-based qualification protocols
• Development and application of machine learning and/or artificial intelligence tools to investigate additive manufacturing processes and materials selection.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review

Keywords: Additive Manufacturing, Characterization, modeling, simulation, extreme environments, performance optimization, qualification protocols, Alloy Design

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.