High Temperature Gas Furnace - AWARD

The Nuclear Graphite research group at The University of Manchester requires a high temperature furnace to enable users to fully prepare, characterise and in situ test (at high temperature / loads / typical gaseous environments) small irradiated radioactive test specimens, to understand the evolution of material properties in representative nuclear environments. In order achieve full graphitisation of carbon materials temperatures of 3000°C need to be reached and held for significant durations e.g. up to several days. In addition, we intend to recycle radioactive materials through purification and graphitisation requiring the same temperatures, this also requires a furnace to be directly operated under inert environments and coupled to mass spectrometry equipment to detect the evolution of off gases.