Energy & Power Generation

Economic power and proactive public relations

Leaders worldwide see energy as the key element in the rebirth and renewal of the global economy. What role will your company play? Increasing the efficiency of solar panels. Reducing carbon emissions in coal-fired power plants. Increasing the efficiency and life-time of nuclear power systems. Or developing production processes for biofuels. These are just a few examples of the critical role that computational materials science has to play.

Computational materials science is not just an issue of innovation, it’s also an issue of safety. Think about the cost of materials failures. It’s not only physical damage, but also the damage to your corporate reputation and the potential cost of lawsuits and public scrutiny. That’s why it’s critical to make sure you have the most advanced predictive capabilities working for you.

Materials Design can help you predict materials behavior in their operating environment and under extreme conditions, optimize existing materials, and screen new candidates. Explore and capture the design options that could put your company at the forefront of the next major innovation in the energy industry.

Where will the next breakthrough come from? Here are just a few places where computational materials science could power up the energy industry:

• Improving the high-temperature corrosion resistance of structural materials by novel alloys
• Improving the creep resistance of steels by controlling precipitates
• Prolonging the life-time of nuclear fuels by novel materials
• Reducing corrosion of cladding materials in fuel rods
• Introducing new cladding materials for high-temperature gas reactors, e.g. silicon carbide
• Controlling fuel-cladding interactions
• Improving resistance to radiation damage and stress corrosion cracking in reactor components and waste storage containers
• Reducing corrosion by fluids in primary and secondary circuits
• Immobilizing radioactive waste, diffusion, phase transformation (amorphization), and leakage
• Improving performance and reliability of graphite-based high-temperature reactors by better understanding radiation-induced changes in mechanical and thermal properties
• Increasing the operating temperature of gas turbines with better thermal barrier coatings
• Reducing the cost of solar panels by novel materials and better control of heterojunctions
• Reducing CO, NOx, and SOx emission in electric power plants by better catalysts and filters
• Improving efficiency of thermo-electric conversion by innovative nano-structured materials
• Improving the diffusion properties in solid oxide fuel cells
• Reducing the cost of catalytic materials in fuel cells
• Efficient sequestration of carbon dioxide