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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
S. X. Zhao, F. Liu, S. G. Qin, J. P. Song, G.-N. Luo
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 225-229
Materials Development | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18081
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The first attempt at developing chopped W fiber-reinforced W (Wf/W) composites without an engineered interface or inter-phase employing hot isostatic pressing (HIP) has been made in order to study the feasibility of the powder metallurgy (PM) fabrication methodology. Micro-structures and flexural properties of sintered compacts have been examined by an optical microscope (OM), a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with an electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) instrument and three-point bending (3PB) tests. There are some chrysan-themum-like grains around each fiber in W matrices. Mechanical properties, namely strength and pseudo-plasticity, of the sintered compacts are far from satisfactory. Abnormal grain growth does not seem to have a preferential growing direction according to EBSD results. Possible causes for the abnormal grain growth and further mechanical property optimizations are hereby presented.
