Tom (Mark) Lapington
Tom is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant looking at the combined effect of irradiation and liquid metal corrosion on steels used in liquid lead (Pb) and lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) cooled fast reactors. These synergistic irradiation-corrosion effects are being studied in collaboration with MIT, using their new facility to simultaneously expose a range of steels to Pb/LBE and proton irradiation. Tom’s role is to characterise the chemistry and microstructure of these exposed steels from the macroscopic to the atomic scale, using X-ray diffraction and electron-backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to measure lattice orientation and strain, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to characterise defect content and chemical composition, and atomprobe tomography (APT) to examine atomic scale chemical composition.
Tom’s other research interests include
- Development and optimisation of high temperature alloys, such as nickel superalloys and titanium for aerospace applications.
- Improving damage tolerance by understanding the mechanisms behind oxidation, corrosion, fatigue, creep etc
- 3D visualisation using tomographical techniques: X-ray CT and Atom Probe Tomography
- Development of complementary FIB-based sample preparation techniques integrating Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX) and Transmission Kikuchi Diffraction (TKD).
