Materials Trainee
Pubblicato il 07-10-2026 - newcleo in Torino
Internship Overview
The Material Characterization Unit (MCC Lab) at newcleo’s Environment Park site in Turin supports the development of Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs) by characterizing the structural materials and protective coatings that will operate in demanding, reactor-relevant environments, including heavy liquid metals.
This internship focuses on the mechanical characterization of bulk materials and coatings at the micro- and nano-scale, using complementary techniques available in the lab: instrumented scratch testing, indentation and nanoindentation and in-situ mechanical testing in SEM (Alemnis). The main purpose is to extract the maximum information from each instrument, correlate the measured mechanical response with other material properties, and translate this know-how into a robust, reproducible characterization protocol.
Main objectives
• Master the working principles, limitations and data-analysis methods of scratch testing, nanoindentation and in-situ mechanical testing.
• Identify and quantify the full set of properties that can be obtained from each technique (e.g., hardness, elastic modulus, creep and strain-rate sensitivity, critical loads and adhesion, friction, yield/flow stress, fracture behavior).
• Correlate mechanical results with microstructure, chemistry, phase content, thickness, roughness and other material properties, on both bulk materials and coatings.
• Develop and validate a characterization protocol (sample preparation, test parameters, calibration, data processing and reporting) to be adopted as a standard practice in the MCC Lab.
Work Plan
The internship lasts 6 months and is organized in the following phases. The plan will be refined together with the supervisor according to sample availability and instrument scheduling.
Month 1 – Onboarding and state of the art
• Laboratory safety and instrument training (scratch tester, nanoindenter, in-situ mechanical testing stage).
• Literature review on instrumented indentation (Oli