Diffusion cladding of solid radioisotope production targets
William Gelbart
ASD Inc.
Poster
The author claims no conflicts of interest.
Solid parent materials, mostly metallic, are usually attached to a substrate (metal part, often copper or silver) to support it during handling and irradiation and to facilitate liquid or gas cooling to remove the heat generated by the particle beam.
Many metallic elements can be electroplated, but some can not be plated at all, or cannot produce a sufficiently successful cladding of the target substrate. A specific case is molybdenum that so far cannot be successfully electroplated.
This paper describes the cladding of substrates with parent materials by thermal diffusion. The process consists of deposition on the substrate the parent material in the form of powder mixed with a binder, drying, rolling the deposit to a uniform thickness and diffusion bonding at high temperature and low pressure or in the presence of non oxidizing gas. Hydrogen was used successfully in the tests.
Following the diffusion bonding, the target is formed to the desired shape by conventional machining and forming tools.