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. 2025 Mar 27;18(7):1514.
doi: 10.3390/ma18071514.

Assessing the Practical Constraints and Capabilities of Accelerator-Based Focused Ion Thermal Analysis

Rijul R Chauhan  1 , Artur Santos Paixao  1 , Benjamin E Mejia Diaz  1 , Frank A Garner  1 , Lin Shao  1
Affiliations

Assessing the Practical Constraints and Capabilities of Accelerator-Based Focused Ion Thermal Analysis

Rijul R Chauhan et al. Materials (Basel). .

Abstract

This study investigates the capabilities of accelerator-based Focused Ion Thermal Analysis (FITA), a remote nondestructive method developed for characterizing thermal properties using a proton beam as a localized heat source. Employing infrared (IR) imaging, FITA captures the evolution of temperature in material samples after the beam is deactivated, enabling precise extraction of thermal properties. However, the performance of FITA is inherently influenced by the IR camera's resolution and frame rate, which imposes constraints on the types of materials that can be effectively analyzed. Here, a comprehensive series of finite element analysis (FEA) simulations were performed to evaluate the applicability of FITA for a wide range of materials. These simulations assess how variations in IR camera specifications impact the effectiveness of FITA in analyzing different materials. Our findings show that the current method can characterize a wide range of materials, including the majority of nuclear materials typically used in the nuclear industry.

Keywords: IR; finite element analysis; proton irradiation; thermal property.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Schematic of the FITA setup, featuring an ultra-high-vacuum chamber, a heated sample stage, a proton beam for localized heating, and an IR camera monitoring thermal response through an IR-transparent window.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(Top) Experimentally obtained temperature evolution of UO2 at t = 0, 1/300, 2/300, and 4/300 s after the beam is turned off. (Bottom) Modeling-predicted temperature evolution using thermal diffusivity values obtained from the literature [9].
Figure 3
Figure 3
(Top) Modeled temperature evolution of the hot spot induced by 2 MeV proton bombardment in aluminum oxide. (Bottom) Modeled temperature evolution under the same conditions for graphite.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Map of thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity for materials randomly selected for simulation. The green-colored region represents the range where the material’s thermal properties are measurable, based on the criterion that a hot spot with a temperature difference of >0.5 °C remains after 5/30 s following the beam being turned off.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The effect of increasing camera frame rate on the map of measurable thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The map of measurable thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity, overlaid with the properties of materials commonly used in industrial applications. The properties were replotted with permission from Reference [11].
Figure 7
Figure 7
The map of measurable thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity, overlaid with the properties of nuclear materials commonly used in nuclear industry [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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