Production of near-full density uranium nitride microspheres with a hot isostatic press

Jacob W. McMurray; Jim O. Kiggans; Grant W. Helmreich; Kurt A. Terrani

doi:10.1111/jace.15766

Production of near-full density uranium nitride microspheres with a hot isostatic press

Jacob W. McMurray, Jim O. Kiggans, Grant W. Helmreich, Kurt A. Terrani

Particle Fuel Forms

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Depleted uranium nitride (UN) kernels with diameters ranging from 420 to 858 microns and theoretical densities (TD) between 87 and 91 percent were postprocessed using a hot isostatic press (HIP) in an argon gas media. This treatment was shown to increase the TD up to above 97%. Uranium nitride is highly reactive with oxygen. Therefore, a novel crucible design was implemented to remove impurities in the argon gas via in situ gettering to avoid oxidation of the UN kernels. The density before and after each HIP procedure was calculated from average weight, volume, and ellipticity determined with established characterization techniques for particle. Micrographs confirmed the nearly full densification of the particles using the gettering approach and HIP processing parameters investigated in this work.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	4492-4497
Number of pages	6
Journal	Journal of the American Ceramic Society
Volume	101
Issue number	10
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/jace.15766
State	Published - Oct 2018

Funding

The authors are grateful to Brian Jolly and Michael Trammell at ORNL for valuable critiques and to Rachel Seibert for technical support and insight. The work presented in this paper was supported by the Advanced Fuels Campaign of the Fuel Cycle R&D program in the Office of Nuclear Energy, US Department of Energy. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).

Funders	Funder number
US Department of Energy
Office of Nuclear Energy
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Keywords

densification
hot isostatic pressing
oxidation
uranium/uranium compounds

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10.1111/jace.15766

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title = "Production of near-full density uranium nitride microspheres with a hot isostatic press",

abstract = "Depleted uranium nitride (UN) kernels with diameters ranging from 420 to 858 microns and theoretical densities (TD) between 87 and 91 percent were postprocessed using a hot isostatic press (HIP) in an argon gas media. This treatment was shown to increase the TD up to above 97%. Uranium nitride is highly reactive with oxygen. Therefore, a novel crucible design was implemented to remove impurities in the argon gas via in situ gettering to avoid oxidation of the UN kernels. The density before and after each HIP procedure was calculated from average weight, volume, and ellipticity determined with established characterization techniques for particle. Micrographs confirmed the nearly full densification of the particles using the gettering approach and HIP processing parameters investigated in this work.",

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Production of near-full density uranium nitride microspheres with a hot isostatic press

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