Reed said the radiation testing at Ohio State showed that heat seemed to be more harmful to the gallium nitride than radiation. So, the research team wants to measure how gallium nitride reacts to heat alone. “Since the ultimate goal is to design circuits with these materials, once we understand the temperature and radiation effects, we can compensate for them in the circuit design,” Reed said. 

Better nuclear monitoring means increased safety and reduced operating costs, Ezell noted. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars are lost every day a reactor is shut down,” she said. “If we’re going to make nuclear economically competitive with other energy industries, we’ve got to keep our costs low.” Plus, reducing the frequency of maintenance reduces human safety risks. “You’re able to avoid putting people in harsh radiation environments or handling radioactive material as often,” Ezell added.

Although gallium nitride has been commercially available for around a decade, it’s not widely used, Reed said. “We’re opening up different side avenues for using gallium nitride, so we can start to create a more reasonable market demand for investment, research and workforce development for subclasses of electronics beyond consumer-grade,” Reed said. 

In the long run, researchers would like to demonstrate that gallium nitride circuits could be used to transmit data from sensors wirelessly. The material is already used for devices that support radio frequency applications, like cell phones, and for power electronics. 

ORNL researchers, staff and interns including Nance Ericson, Brett Witherspoon, Craig Gray, Emma Brown, Adam Buchalter, Caleb Damron and former intern Kevin Deng also contributed to the project, which was funded by DOE’s Nuclear Energy program.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Hardy transistor material could be game-changer for nuclear reactor safety monitoring" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news