Description
Future fusion reactors critically depend on the selection of appropriate materials for the so-called 'first wall'. These metals come into direct contact with the plasma and are hence exposed to high temperatures and neutron fluxes. The fusion community agrees that tungsten addresses these issues best, but its room-temperature brittleness still needs to be resolved, as this compromises the malleability and long-term stability of fusion reactor components. Alloying may offer a solution.
The number of possible tungsten alloys is nearly unlimited, however, and only a computational approach enables an assessment of a sufficiently large number of candidate compounds within a reasonable time. The FWO fellowship of Kurt Lejaeghere aims at performing such a computational screening in a high-throughput fashion. Whereas this fellowship previously allowed the benchmark of the elemental phases (DOI: 10.1080/10408436.2013.772503 and 10.1103/PhysRevB.89.014304) and the calibration of new methodologies using the tungsten binaries (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.075501), it is now the aim to investigate ternary tungsten alloys, which are more relevant for actual fusion research. To do this, the previously developed high-throughput methods will be used.
