Missions

Superconducting technologies have been known and used for several decades to produce strong magnetic fields. The high costs of current superconducting systems, as well as the investment and operating costs of the associated infrastructure, particularly cryogenic systems for operation at very low temperatures (helium at 4.2 K), are the obstacles identified to wider industrial deployment. Recent advances in the field of so-called “high critical temperature (HTc)” superconductors are opening up new opportunities in response to these challenges, expectations, and markets of tomorrow's societies, in particular through a more favorable cryogenic environment (hydrogen at 10-20 K or even liquid nitrogen at 77 K), accessibility to higher magnetic inductions (greater 20 T) and less sensitivity to external disturbances.
The scientific topics concerned are solid mechanics, mechanical design, and materials mechanics.
The missions are twofold: to develop experimental tools for studying materials at very low temperatures (design work); to model the behavior of certain metallic materials at very low temperatures (theoretical and numerical modeling work).

Activités

Research work will focus on two areas. First, a review of the state of the art in existing experimental tools for studying materials at very low temperatures (cryogenic testing) and, in this context, the “design” of a tool (specifications, subcontractor requests, etc.) enabling fairly complex cryogenic mechanical tests (tension, shear, bending, etc.) to be carried out on different forms of superconductors (cable strands, ribbon, etc.), with the ultimate aim of providing the LMA with an experimental platform for low-temperature testing (in the nuclear field, but also in space, etc.). In a second phase, work will be carried out on modeling the mechanical behavior of metallic materials at very low temperatures, based on the already relatively rich literature on the subject.

Compétences

Desired skills :
MATERIALS AND PROCESSES :
Metals, Manufacturing and forming processes, Durability and degradation, corrosion, Fracture mechanics
MODELING - SIMULATION :
Data entry: digital representation of materials, behavior laws, meshing, finite element process simulation (static and dynamic analysis), parametric analysis, and experimental verification.
CHARACTERIZATION AND TESTING :
Mechanical testing (tension, bending, fatigue).
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
DESIGN TOOLS

Contexte de travail

This subject is part of the SupraFusion PEPR (Priority Research Programs and Equipment) and the LabCom MISTRAL collaboration between the Mechanics and Acoustics Laboratory (LMA, UMR 7031) and the CEA. This PEPR aims to develop high critical temperature superconductors to meet the energy and societal challenges of tomorrow (with applications in fusion).

Le poste se situe dans un secteur relevant de la protection du potentiel scientifique et technique (PPST), et nécessite donc, conformément à la réglementation, que votre arrivée soit autorisée par l'autorité compétente du MESR.

Contraintes et risques

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