Alamos National Laboratory Develop NanoFoams- An Answer To Radiation

Radiation damage is a cause of concern recently, especially after Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan. Nuclear energy and Nuclear materials though a need of time, also pose long term damage in case of natural calamities and other similar situations as seen in Japan today. It would hence be a beneficial deal to develop materials which could expose these harmful nuclear radiations. A team at Alamos National Laboratory is busy finding such interface material and taking in to account all the possibilities.

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The interface material can be used to boost security of not only the nuclear power plants but also that of the spacecrafts from radiation in universe. The research team is focusing on materials called as nanofoams. These materials are ideal as nuclear safety interfaces because of their high densities for absorbing large amount of radiations. The surface of nanofoams provides a high density sink for radiations.

Researchers of Alamos National Laboratory were working on this idea assuming that internal voids in material are a very good option for trapping radiation and foams, which provide such interface, would be suitable provided that they do not melt during the collision cascade. Mr. Jose Alfredo Caro, a researcher in this team said that this assumption was very helpful and they could prove that such a void can resist radiation. The research mainly circulated around combining the results obtained by experimentation and simulations of simple models of nanofoams.

The team is happy of their achievement. The researchers have achieved this success when they were actually playing with this topic during their leisure time. However, this is not the first time when a study has been done in this field. Even prior to this, people have made attempts to explore the properties of nanofoams.

These nanoscale foams are still a laboratory achievement and much away from industrial reach. The main difficulty in their usage is their high cost. They are still uneconomical from production point of view. More research is required in this direction to bring foams to industrial levels. We compare it with metamaterials which are of course of slightly different field but have contributed to significant new inventions in the present century. Nanofoams are similarly a not yet researched upon topic and the material on the whole hold promising new avenues for the further development of radiation protective equipments.

Source: Nanofoams are promising materials for radiation shielding| Los Alamos National Lab: National Security Science