Novel radiation dense hard materials: Reactive sintered borides

Abstract

Reactive sintered borides (RSB) were first synthesised in 2016 and are novel hard materials developed as a lower-energy (< 1 keV) neutron absorber with an initial focus for compact radiation shielding in fusion reactors. Despite their novelty, there has been much research on the development and testing of RSBs as candidate nuclear shielding materials. RSBs have attracted considerable attention as low-energy neutron shielding material in combination with low-activation cemented tungsten carbides (cWC) to form the cWC-RSB concept for compact radiation shielding which has the potential to attenuate neutron and γ-rays equal or better than to that of metallic tungsten Mechanical testing indicates that most RSB compositions have hardness and toughness similar to fine-grained cWCs.

This work details the current state-of-the-art of RSB development and analysis. This includes microscopy, proton and gamma irradiation, RSB-specific sintering processing, exploration of the phase diagram, and mechanical properties of RSBs. Dense RSBs of a variety of compositions have been synthesised demonstrating the potential of RSBs as radiation dense materials and new hard materials.