- Key People:
- Shuji Nakamura
- Akasaki Isamu
- Amano Hiroshi
- Related Topics:
- technology
- material
An important example of dealing with old problems by modern methods is provided by the prevention of crack growth in offshore oil-drilling platforms. The primary structure consists of welded steel tubing that is subject to continually varying stress from ocean waves. Since the cost of building and deploying a platform can amount to several billion dollars, it is imperative that the platform have a long life and not be lost because of premature metal failure.
In the North Sea, 75 percent of the waves are higher than two metres (six feet) and exert considerable stresses on the platform. Cyclic loading of a metal ultimately results in fatigue failure in which surface cracks form, grow over time, and eventually cause the metal to break. Welds are the weak spots for such a process because weld metal has mechanical properties that are inferior to steel, and these are made even worse by internal stresses and defects (such as tiny voids and oxide particles) that are introduced in the welding process. Furthermore, the tube geometry at the weld consists of T- and K-shaped joints, which are natural stress concentrators. Fatigue failure in oil platforms therefore takes place at welds.
Fatigue occurs because cyclic stress causes dislocations to form and to move back and forth in the metal. Dislocation motion can be impeded by the presence of barriers such as small voids, grain boundaries, other dislocations, impurities, or even the surface itself. When dislocations are thereby pinned down, they stop the motion of other dislocations created by the stress, and a tangled dislocation network forms that results in a hard spot in the weld. The stress is then not easily relieved, and types of dislocation motion that are characteristic of the fatigue process initiate a crack at the weld surface. This phenomenon is a direct result of the microstructure of the weld and could be minimized by making the weld very uniform, preferably of the same material as the tubing, and having a very gently curved geometry at the joint. But, in spite of the sophistication of modern welding techniques, this is not yet feasible. An alternate strategy is therefore used in which the progress of the weld crack is monitored so that repairs can be made in time to avoid catastrophic failure. This can be done because, given the geometry of the joint, the depth of the crack is proportional to time until the crack is quite large. By contrast, in laboratory tests in which simple strips of metal are subject to cyclic stress, the growth rate increases as the crack becomes larger. In the T or K configuration in oil platforms, stress is much more evenly distributed, and the crack does not grow at an increasing speed until it is close to being fatal.
A technique for measuring the crack depth is based on the skin effect, the phenomenon in which a high-frequency alternating current is confined to the surface of a conductor. This makes it possible to measure the surface area of a small region with a simple meter, since an increase in crack depth means an increase in current path, and this in turn causes an increase in voltage drop. Measurement over time then allows the time to failure to be estimated; repairs can be effected before failure occurs. In this case, a knowledge of microstructure, the materials science of fatigue, and the study of crack formation have led to a simple testing technique of great economic importance.
Mathematical modeling of mass motion and heat transfer (including convection), along with studies of solidification, gas dissolution, and the effects of fluxes, are providing a much more detailed understanding of the factors controlling weld structure. With this knowledge, it should be possible to make welds with far fewer defects.
Radioactive waste
A different example is provided by the disposal of radioactive waste. Here the issue is primarily safety and the perception of safety rather than economics. Waste disposal will continue to be one of the factors that inhibit the exploitation of nuclear power until the public perceives it as posing no danger. The current plan is to interpose three barriers between the waste and human beings by first encapsulating it in a solid material, putting that in a metal container, and finally burying that container in geologically stable formations. The first step requires an inert, stable material that will hold the radioactive atoms trapped for a very long time, while the second step requires a material that is highly resistant to corrosion and degradation.
There are two good candidates for encapsulation. The first is borosilicate glass; this can be melted with the radioactive material, which then becomes a part of the glass structure. Glass has a very low solubility, and atoms in it have a very low rate of migration, so that it provides an excellent barrier to the escape of radioactivity. However, glass devitrifies at the high temperatures resulting from the heat of radioactive decay; that is to say, the amorphous glassy state becomes crystalline, and, during this process, many cracks form in the material so that it no longer provides a good barrier against the escape of radioactive atoms. (This problem is more severe in rock than in salt formations, because salt has higher thermal conductivity than rock and dissipates the heat more easily.) The problem can be eased by storing the waste above ground for a decade or so. This would allow the initially high rate of decay to decrease, thereby lowering the temperature that would be reached after encapsulation. Handled in this way, borosilicate glass would be an excellent encapsulation material for reactor waste that had been aged for a decade or so.
The other candidate is a synthetic rock made of mineral mixtures such as zirconolite and perovskite. These are very insoluble and, in their natural state, are known to have sequestered radioactive elements for hundreds of millions of years. They are crystalline, ceramic materials whose crystal structures allow radioactive atoms to be immobilized within them. They are not subject to devitrification, since they are already crystalline.
Once encapsulated, radioactive waste must be put into canisters that are corrosion-resistant. These can be made of nickel-steel alloys, but the best candidate so far is a titanium material containing small amounts of nickel and molybdenum and traces of carbon and iron. Even though they are meant to be buried in as dry an environment as possible, these metals are tested by immersing them in brine. Tests show that seawater at 250° C (480° F) would corrode away less than one micrometre (one-thousandth of a millimetre, or four ten-thousandths of an inch) of the surface of the titanium material (known as Ti code 12) per year. This remarkable performance is primarily the result of a tough, highly resistant oxide skin that forms on titanium when exposed to oxygen. It would take thousands of years for the canisters to be penetrated by corrosion.
In order to estimate the effectiveness of such waste disposal, it must be noted that the waste is highly radioactive and dangerous initially but that the danger decreases with time. Radioactivity decays to such levels that the danger is much less after a few hundred years, extremely low after 500 years, and negligible after 1,000 years. In order to breach the triple-barrier system, groundwater must migrate to the canister, eat it away, and then leach out the radioactive atoms from the encapsulating glass or ceramic. This is a process that most probably would take far longer than a single millennium. A careful application of materials science can make radioactive waste disposal safer than current disposal methods for other toxic wastes.
Photovoltaics
Photovoltaic systems are an attractive alternative to fossil or nuclear fuels for the generation of electricity. Sunlight is free, it does not use up an irreplaceable resource, and its conversion to electricity is nonpolluting. In fact, photovoltaics are now in use where power lines from utility grids are either not possible or do not exist, as in outer space or remote, nonurban locations.
The barrier to widespread use of sunlight to generate electricity is the cost of photovoltaic systems. The application of materials science is essential in efforts to lower the cost to levels that can compete with those for fossil or nuclear fuels.
The conversion of light to electricity depends on the electronic structure of solar cells with two or more layers of semiconductor material that can absorb photons, the primary energy packets of light. The photons raise the energy level of the electrons in the semiconductor, exciting some to jump from the lower-energy valence band to the higher-energy conduction band. The electrons in the conduction band and the holes they have left behind in the valence band are both mobile and can be induced to move by a voltage. The electron motion, and the movement of holes in the opposite direction, constitute an electric current. The force that drives electrons and holes through a circuit is created by the junction of two dissimilar semiconducting materials, one of which has a tendency to give up electrons and acquire holes (thereby becoming the positive, or p-type, charge carrier) while the other accepts electrons (becoming the negative, or n-type, carrier). The electronic structure that permits this is the band gap; it is equivalent to the energy required to move an electron from the lower band to the higher. The magnitude of this gap is important. Only photons with energy greater than that of the band gap can excite electrons from the valence band to the conduction band; therefore, the smaller the gap, the more efficiently light will be converted to electricity—since there is a greater range of light frequencies with sufficiently high energies. On the other hand, the gap cannot be too small, because the electrons and holes then find it easy to recombine, and a sizable current cannot be maintained.
The band gap defines the theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell, but this cannot be attained because of other materials factors. For each material there is an intrinsic rate of recombination of electrons and holes that removes their contribution to electric current. This recombination is enhanced by surfaces, interfaces, and crystal defects such as grain boundaries, dislocations, and impurities. Also, a fraction of the light is reflected by the cell’s surface rather than being absorbed, and some can pass through the cell without exciting electrons to the conduction band.
Improvements in the trade-off between cell efficiency and cost are well illustrated by the preparation of silicon that is the basic material of current solar cells. Initially, high-purity silicon was grown from a silicon melt by slowly pulling out a seed crystal that grew by the accretion and slow solidification of the molten material. Known as the Czochralski process, this resulted in a high-purity, single-crystal ingot that was then sliced into wafers about 1 millimetre (0.04 inch) thick. Each wafer’s surface was then “doped” with impurities to create p-type and n-type materials with a junction between them. Metal was then deposited to provide electrical leads, and the wafer was encapsulated to yield a cell about 100 millimetres in diameter. This was an expensive and time-consuming process; it has been much improved in a variety of ways. For example, high-purity silicon can be made at drastically reduced cost by chemically converting ordinary silicon to silane or trichlorosilane and then reducing it back to silicon. This silane process is capable of continuous operation at a high production rate and with low energy input. In order to avoid the cost and waste associated with sawing silicon into wafers, methods of directly drawing molten silicon into thin sheets or ribbons have been developed; these can produce crystalline, polycrystalline, or amorphous material. Another alternative is the manufacture of thin films on ceramic substrates—a process that uses much less silicon than other methods. Single-crystal silicon has a higher efficiency than other forms, but it is also much more expensive. The materials challenge is to find a combination of cost and efficiency that makes photovoltaic electricity economically possible.
Surface treatments that increase efficiency include deposition of antireflecting coatings, such as silicon nitride, on the front of the cell and highly reflective coatings on the rear. Thus, more of the light that strikes a cell actually enters it, and light that escapes out the back is reflected back into the cell. An ingenious surface treatment is part of the point contact method, in which the surface of the cell is not planar but microgrooved so that light is randomly reflected as it strikes the cell. This increases the amount of light that can be captured by the cell.
Louis A. Girifalco