Sid Pathak, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is the university lead in a project selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) to develop next-generation materials critical to commercializing fusion power.
The goal of these projects, managed through the Creating Hardened and Durable fusion first Wall Incorporating Centralized Knowledge (CHADWICK) program, is to discover or develop a class of first wall materials that will maintain design performance over the lifetime of a fusion power plant.
In their CHADWICK program titled ‘Ferritic and Vanadium Alloys with Nanoparticle Strengthening for Fusion (FAVA-NSF)’, Pathak and his project partners plan to develop new alloys with pure powders dispersed with nanoparticles shown to increase alloy strength and irradiation resistance.
The powder material will be made into plates by spraying the powder and friction stir processing onto a surface. This new fabrication technique can be completed at room temperature and bypass problems related to microstructural inhomogeneities during melting.
Project partners for FAVA-NSF include Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Ames National Laboratory, the University of Michigan, Baylor University and Citrine Informatics.
At Iowa State University Pathak leads a research group interested in quantitative understanding of material behavior at lower (sub-micrometer) length scales under extremes of temperature, strain rate and damage (e.g. irradiation). In his PAVA-NSF CHADWICK project, Pathak will be responsible for micro-scale testing of the ferritic and vanadium alloys before and after ion-irradiation to investigate their radiation tolerance.
Prior to starting his faculty career at Iowa State, Pathak was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a Keck Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. He has received numerous scientific awards based for his work including the 2017 TMS Young Leaders Professional Development Award, one of the 2019 Top UNR Researchers for his university, as well as the 2019 DARPA Young Faculty Award and the 2020 NSF EPSCoR Research Fellowship. Pathak has also recently received a 2024 NSF CAREER Award for studying pseudomorphic phases in multilayered nano-laminates