ERC PhD studentship in Seeking precursors of Stress Corrosion Cracking

Materials response to harsh irradiation, temperature and corrosive media is preventing the successful exploitation of innovative nuclear fusion, advanced fission technologies for sustainable energy production and human exploration of faraway planets. Specifically, materials degradation and early failures hinder these scientific longstanding endeavours. The current paradigm to tackle these issues is to implement mitigating solutions or to characterise the surrounding environment to understand failure initiation and propagation.

URÅNIA shifts this approach by focusing directly on understanding the incubation stage prior to initiation events.

The Principal Investigator's research group will demonstrate the URÅNIA methodology by: i) creating a novel gold standard to reveal the incubation stage of materials degradation phenomena; ii) revealing precursors affecting the transition from incubation to initiation, iii) linking precursors nanoscale effect to macroscopic degradation behaviour.

The aim of this post is to: (i) support the development of SCC initiation tool, perform SCC initiation and incubation testing, (ii) use of advanced microscopy techniques to reveal precursors of SCC

The postholder will work in strong synergy with all URÅNIA team members, be based at the University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering and collaborate extensively with other Departments at Cambridge, mainly the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy, and URÅNIA partners: Imperial College London, specifically with the Imperial Centre for Cryo Microscopy, UKAEA Materials Research Facility, Australian Nuclear Science Technology Organisation (ANSTO), Marcoule Institute in Separation Chemistry (ICSM), Joint Research Centre, University of Bristol, Bangor University and beyond under the guidance of the PI. This opportunity necessitates the postholder to work for short period of times in other sites across the above-mentioned partners.

Applicants should have (or expect to obtain by the start date) at least a good 2.1 degree in an Engineering, Materials Science, Physics or Chemistry related subject. A degree with major or minor in Nuclear related subjects is an asset.