Home-AMA: Energy Loughborough University: Additive Manufacturing and the Quest for Fusion Energy Materials
WithAMA: Energy 2026approaching, 3D Printing Industry is taking a closer look at the role of additive manufacturing in the energy sector.
When most engineers think about the challenges of nuclear fusion, they think about plasma temperatures of 50 million degrees Celsius, magnetic containment, and tritium fuel cycles. Moataz Attallah, newly appointed Dean of the School of Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical, and Materials Engineering atLoughborough University, thinks about something far more fundamental: what the reactor walls are made of, and how to build them.
Speaking from his new role, having moved his research group the Advanced Materials Processing Laboratory (AMPLanb) from theUniversity of Birmingham, where the research was conducted, Attallah presented findings from a major UK-funded program involvingMetamorphic AMand private fusion companyTokamak Energy. The work focused on one of the most stubborn unsolved problems in fusion engineering: finding a material that can survive the inside of a reactor, and a manufacturing process that can actually build it.
The Material Problem Nobody Talks About
The physics of fusion, Attallah argues, is largely understood. The materials science is not. The walls of a fusion reactor must withstand extreme heat flux, constant radiation, and thermal shock, conditions that eliminate most conventional engineering materials immediately. The candidates that remain are refractory metals: tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum, niobium, and rhenium. Each has a melting point above 2,000 degrees Celsius. Each is also deeply problematic to work with.
Oxygen is the main problem. Even trace amounts, as little as four parts per million, can dramatically reduce ductility and strength in tungsten. Refractory metals have a high affinity for oxygen, meaning that any manufacturing environment that is not rigorously controlled will compromise the material before it ever reaches a reactor. Compounding this, most refractory metals are not considered weldable, which in additive manufacturing terms is a warning sign, since weldability is broadly seen as a proxy for printability.
The result is a materials challenge that sits at the intersection of metallurgy, manufacturing process control, and nuclear physics, and one that cannot be solved by any single discipline working alone.
AMPLab’s approach centered on laser powder bed fusion, using tungsten as the primary material but blending it with tantalum to address the oxygen problem. The logic was: tantalum oxides form more readily than tungsten oxides, meaning tantalum acts as a getter, effectively scavenging oxygen ions from the build chamber before they can damage the tungsten matrix. The result was a measurable reduction in the boundary segregation that leads to cracking.
The team designed complex cooling channel geometries, structures requiring highly turbulent internal flow to extract heat from reactor walls, geometries that would be impossible to manufacture by conventional means. Printed samples showed low porosity and, visually at least, were largely crack-free. Mechanical testing atJohns Hopkins University‘s advanced high temperature mechanical testing system returned compressive strength values close to those of standard tungsten, an encouraging early result.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
