Etudes et développement d’un système laser dans l’UV pour la démonstration à l’échelle laboratoire de l’épuration isotopique du palladium (naturel).
Le palladium est un métal rare dont la demande mondiale est en forte augmentation. Or, il est présent en tant que produit de fission dans les combustibles nucléaires usés qui sont retraités en France. Il serait donc intéressant de recycler ce métal. Pour cela, il est nécessaire de procéder à une épuration isotopique, afin de supprimer un des isotopes du palladium, le 107, qui est un radionucléide artificiel à vie longue émetteur béta. Dans le cadre d'un nouveau projet sur 4 ans construit en réponse à l'appel d'offre du Plan d'Investissement et d'Avenir de l’État, le Service d’Etude des Procédés d’Enrichissement propose un contrat post-doctoral portant sur le développement d’un système laser dans l’UV pour le procédé de séparation isotopique du palladium par Lasers actuellement en cours de développement. L’objectif principal du projet est la démonstration finale de la faisabilité de séparation de palladium naturel (et non radioactif) pour la phase suivante de développement d’un premier pilote.
Le post-doctorant devra développer des lasers prototypes de procédé à haute cadence en partant du visible (système lasers colorant) jusqu’à l'UV. Le passage dans l’UV se fait par doublage de fréquence avec des objectifs élevés en terme de performance. Il s’agit d’utiliser un cristal doubleur de fréquence de type BBO, LBO, KDP ou autre. Pour ce faire, le post-doctorat participera à la définition de ce cristal, mais aussi au développement de l’environnement du cristal doubleur (comportement, performances attendues et la tenue au flux des différents matériels). Des échanges seront mis en place sur ce sujet spécifique avec des spécialistes reconnus au sein de la Direction de la Recherche Fondamentale du CEA. La programmation (en Python et/ou sous Labview) de ces outils ou asservissements est à développer également. Une attention particulière sera portée sur les publications à réaliser essentiellement dans le cadre du doublage de fréquence, sujet complexe très étudié mondialement.
Decentralized Solar Charging System for Sustainable Mobility in rural Africa
A novel stand-alone solar charging station (SASCS) will be deployed of in Ethiopia. Seeing as 45% of Sub-Saharian Africa’s population lacks direct access to electricity grids and seeing as the the infrastructure necessary to reliably harness other energy sources is largely non-existent for many such populations in Ethiopia, introducing the SASCS among some of the country’s rural communities is a necessary effort. It could ostensibly invigorate communities’ agricultural sector and support those whose employment is rooted in farming. A SASCS could also serve to integrate renewable energy within the country’s existing electricity mix. CEA INES will act as a consulting Partner for the design and implementation of the solution (second life batteries, solar will be investigated). In addition, because of CEA INES’s established expertise in the installation of solar tools within various communities, the initiative will also provide know-how for the installation of the SolChargE in Ethiopia as well as cooperate on workshops for students and technicians employed by the project.
Development of large area substrates for power electronics
Improving the performance of power electronics components is a major challenge for reducing our energy consumption. Diamond appears as the ultimate candidate for power electronics. However, the small dimensions and the price of the substrates are obstacles to the use of this material. The main objective of the work is to overcome these two difficulties by slicing the samples into thin layers by SmartCut™ and by tiling these thin layers to obtain substrates compatible with microelectronics.
For this, various experiments will be carried out in a clean room. Firstly, the SmartCut™ process must be made more reliable. Characterizations such as optical microscopy, AFM, SEM, Raman, XPS, electrical, etc. will be carried out in order to better understand the mechanisms involved in this process.
The candidate might be required to work on other wide-gap materials studied in the laboratory such as GaN and SiC, which will allow him to have a broader view of substrates for power electronics.
Numerical studies of laser plasma interaction in intermediate field on Laser Megajoule
In the Inertial Confinement Fusion experiments (ICF), intense laser beams cross a gas filled hohlraum. The gas is fully ionized and laser beams then propagate into a sub-critical plasma where laser plasma instabilites can develop. Optical smoothing techniques enable to break both spatial and temporal coherences so that both spatial and temporal scales of the beam become smaller than those required for the development of the instabilites. The breaking of spatial coherence is done thanks to the use of a phase plate which spreads the laser energy in a multitude of light grains called speckles. The breaking of temporal coherence is done by using a phase modulator which widens the spectrum and by dispersing each frequency with a grating. It is essential to know the statistical properties of speckles (width, lenght, contrast, coherence time, velocities ...) to be able to predict the instabilities levels which can depend on time and on the distance of propagation of the beam. .
For the sake of simplicity, the laser plasma instabilities are very often studied at the best focus of the beam. However, in the FCI experiments, laser beams are focused near the laser entrance hole of the hohlraum whose length is about 1 cm. The development of instabilities can then occur before the best focus (outside the hohlraum) and mainly beyond the best focus (far inside the hohlraum). The goal of this post-doctoral contract is to study the development of instabilities when it occurs in the intermediate field (far from the best focus of the beam) and to assess the efficiency of different smoothing options on Lase MagaJoule (LMJ) to limit these instabilities. We will especially study propagation instabilities (self-focusing, forward stimulated Brillouin scattering) and stimulated Brillouin backscattering. This work will be done thanks to numerous existing numerical codes and diagnostic tolls.
Natural convection at high Ra numbers for nuclear safety: 2nd year
Thermal exchanges at very high Rayleigh numbers (Ra) exist on geophysical scale, at civil engineering scale and increasingly in industrial applications and here particularly in the energy sector. At this point, we mention the cooling of solar panels or the heat removal from nuclear power plants under accidental conditions. In fact, the passive safety concept of Small Modular Reactors (SMR) is based on the transfer of residual heat from the reactor to a water pool in which the reactor is placed. Since the outer reactor vessel is very high, heat exchange occurs by natural convection at Rayleigh numbers (Ra) between 1010 and 1016. Reliable heat transfer correlations exist to date only up to about Ra < 1012 with very high uncertainties in the extrapolation to higher Ra. Understanding the heat transfer at very high Ra is thus of fundamental and practical interest. The associated challenges are twofold:
• Numerical challenges: CFD codes cannot model turbulent heat transfer at very high Ra with sufficient accuracy and appropriate calculation time. Improved physical and numerical models are required, which use high performance computing (HPC) capabilities.
• Experimental challenges: Detailed experiments are essential for code validation. Since experiments in water require impractical huge dimensions, cryogenic experiments with helium are planned at CEA, based on the interesting physical properties of this fluid in the range of 5 K (high thermal expansion associated to low viscosity and thermal conduction).
Simulation of a porous medium subjected to high speed impacts
The control of the dynamic response of complex materials (foam, ceramic, metal, composite) subjected to intense solicitations (energy deposition, hypervelocity impact) is a major issue for many applications developed and carried out French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). In this context, CEA CESTA is developing mathematical models to depict the behavior of materials subjected to hypervelocity impacts. Thus, in the context of the ANR ASTRID SNIP (Numerical Simulation of Impacts in Porous Media) in collaboration with the IUSTI (Aix-Marseille Université), studies on the theme of modeling porous materials are conducted. They aim to develop innovative models that are more robust and overcome the theoretical deficits of existing methods (thermodynamic consistency, preservation of the entropy principle). In the context of this post-doc, the candidate will first do a literature review to understand the methods and models developed within IUSTI and CEA CESTA to understand their differences. Secondly, he will study the compatibility between the model developed at IUSTI and the numerical resolution methods used in the hydrodynamics computing code of the CEA CESTA. He will propose adaptations and improvements of this model to take into account all the physical phenomena that we want to capture (plasticity, shear stresses, presence of fluid inclusions, damage) and make its integration into the computation code possible. After a development phase, the validation of all this work will be carried out via comparisons with other existing models, as well as the confrontation with experimental results of impacts from the literature and from CEA database.
Design of 2D Matrix For Silicum Quantum computing with Validation by Simulation
The objective is to design a 2D matrix structure for quantum computing on silicon in order to consider structures of several hundred physical Qubits.
In particular the subject will be focused on:
- The functionality of the structure (Coulomb interaction, RF and quantum)
- Manufacturing constraints (simulation and realistic process constraint)
- The variability of the components (Taking into account the variability parameter and realistic defectivity)
- The constraints induced on the algorithms (error correction code)
- Scalability of the structure to thousands of physical Qubits
The candidate will work within a project of more than fifty people with expertise covering the design, fabrication, characterization and modeling of spin qubits as well as related disciplines (cryoelectronics, quantum algorithms, quantum error correction, …)