Graphene derived lanthanum carbide targets for the SPES ISOL facility

Abstract

Abstract Lanthanum carbide based targets were produced as benchmark tests before the production of radioactive uranium carbide targets. Carbides possessing excess carbon and porosity seem to be the best candidates as target for the production of exotic beams in the SPES-ISOL facility. In addition, the capability of tailoring properties such as grains size and pores size represents a step ahead to improve the ions release efficiency. In this work, multilayered graphene was used as source of carbon for the production of LaCx and the main physical properties of the produced targets were compared to standard LaCx produced using micrometric graphite. The main output of the work consisted in the reduced total porosity (28.8 vol% vs 47.8 vol%) and increased shrinkage (20.4 vol% vs 5.8 vol%) of the LaCx-Graphene samples compared to LaCx-Graphite ones. This result showed how graphene can be successfully employed as sintering aid for the sintering of carbides. Further studies are ongoing with UO2 as starting reagent for carburization within the project AUL-2013-16-176 “Study of the use of graphene as source of carbon for Uranium Carbide-Graphene nanocomposites production” now under conclusion at the European Commission DG Joint Research Centre – JRC.