Dr Benjamin Jenkins

Ben is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant funded as part of UKAEA's NEURONE project, which is developing a novel steel capable of operating at the high temperatures that will be experienced in a fusion power plant.  Ben leads the atom probe tomography (APT) activities in this project, investigating the effects of composition and thermo-mechanical treatments on solute distribution within alloys.  Ben also studies the stability of the steels' microstructure upon exposure to irradiation.

Prior to NEURONE, Ben held a UKAEA Fusion Fellowship at UKAEA, where he studied Li corrosion of a range of materials (metallic and non-metallic) and developed capabilities to study hydrogen isotopes with APT.  Ben also held a Marie-Curie Fellowship at the University of Rouen, where he investigated the suitability of using additive manufacture to produce materials for nuclear applications.  Before these fellowships, Ben completed a post doc where he was the atom probe lead in the MIDAS platform grant, collaborating strongly with universities across the UK (including the University of Manchester).

Ben has extensive experience of using APT to characterise materials that are used as structural components in the nuclear industry, such as reactor pressure vessel steels, zirconium alloys, and austenitic steels.  This research is often conducted in collaboration with industry (UKNNL and Rolls Royce).  Ben also has experience of implementing complementary characterisation techniques, such as transmission Kikuchi diffraction, to investigate internal interfaces in materials (e.g. grain boundaries) in a more holistic manner.

Ben’s other research interests include developing novel data analysis methods.  These methods can improve the accuracy of quantitative measurements that are made using the large amounts of data that are collected during APT experiments.  Ben has also developed approaches for increasing the reliability and reproducibility of different analyses that are applied to APT datasets.