How Neutrons Facilitate Research into Gas Turbines and Batteries from Development to Engineering Applications
Ralph Gilles
Abstract
This contribution presents an overview of how neutrons support the development of gas turbine materials and batteries due to their unique properties of being non-destructive, having a large beam cross section, offering relatively high sensitivity to light elements in the neighborhood of heavy elements and proving suitable for in situ and/or operando studies. Various neutron techniques, together with sophisticated sample environments, are applied to measure materials under real working conditions. For gas turbines, the focus is on the in situ characterization of the strengthening precipitates of high-temperature alloys at elevated temperatures. Battery research using neutrons deals mainly with the observation of Li movements and distributions, e.g., during charging and discharging of a cell or under the influence of an external parameter, such as temperature.