Site specific, high-resolution characterisation of porosity in graphite using FIB-SEM tomography

Arregui-Mena, Jose' D.; Edmondson, Philip D.; Campbell, Anne A.; Katoh, Yutai

doi:10.1016/j.jnucmat.2018.08.047

Title: Site specific, high-resolution characterisation of porosity in graphite using FIB-SEM tomography

Journal Article · 01 December 2018 · Journal of Nuclear Materials

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnucmat.2018.08.047 · OSTI ID:1471932

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Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Graphite is used as a moderator of fast neutrons in some types of nuclear reactors and for other industrial applications. The influence of smaller pores on the mechanical and physical properties of graphite remains to be fully understood. Here in this work, focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) tomography was applied to characterise the porosity of AGX graphite – an electrode material. FIB-SEM tomography consists in alternating the ion milling and SEM imaging at an area of interest with the objective of creating a 3D reconstruction. Regions containing a filler and a mixture of filler and binder were selected as the areas of interest. Resolutions of a few nanometers were achieved in volumes up to 1400 μm³ for both regions. Typical porous structures were detected in the filler and binder regions such as thermal cracks, gas evolution porosity and lenticular pores. The resolution achieved with these experiments made possible detection of pores smaller than 150 nm in diameter, that is of the length scale of voids generated by neutron irradiation, and an improvement in spatial resolution of traditional x-ray tomography studies. The resolution achieved by FIB-SEM tomography may be essential for the study of the microstructure of graphite, providing complimentary data to x-ray tomography experiments.

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Research Organization:: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE

Grant/Contract Number:: AC05-00OR22725

OSTI ID:: 1471932

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1635887

Journal Information:: Journal of Nuclear Materials, Vol. 511, Issue C; ISSN 0022-3115

Publisher:: ElsevierCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

Citation Metrics:

Cited by: 30 works

Citation information provided by
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Cited By (1)

A Review of Finite Element Method Models for Nuclear Graphite Applications Arregui-Mena, José David; Worth, Robert N.; Hall, Graham Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, Vol. 27, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-018-09310-y	journal	December 2018

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Data for: Site specific, high-resolution characterisation of porosity in graphite using FIB-SEM tomography Arregui-Mena, José https://doi.org/10.17632/cgbmz3hd58.1 The current record is supplemented by this dataset	dataset	January 2018
Data for: Site specific, high-resolution characterisation of porosity in graphite using FIB-SEM tomography Arregui-Mena, José https://doi.org/10.17632/cgbmz3hd58 The current record is supplemented by this dataset	dataset	January 2018