10/20/2025 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
Mechanical engineering doctoral student Lucille Dentice was recently awarded a three-year graduate fellowship from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy to experimentally characterize creep in radiation-resistant alloys. Dentice is advised by Professor Janelle Wharry.
Subject to the effects of irradiation, materials in nuclear reactors must withstand persistent corrosion and temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius. Under these conditions, reactor materials tend to experience creep, or slow stretching over time due to applied loads—which can lead to potentially dangerous failure.
“One of the fun things about doing experimental research on long-term problems like corrosion and creep is that you have to get really creative and think about how to study this in a reasonable time frame while also getting meaningful data that can be used to make predictions for future results and accurately plan for worst-case scenarios,” Dentice said.
She will use scanning electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction to characterize sample materials and visualize their grain structure—the finer the better for staving off radiation-related damage. She will then expose the materials to radiation and use transmission electron microscopy to analyze how the resulting irradiation impacts the materials’ microstructure, paying special attention to any accumulation of defects.
“From there, the key experiment will be to manufacture nanopillars [from these materials] by ion beam milling,” said Dentice, explaining that she could then compress the pillars using a nanoindenter and measure how each pillar’s structure changes under stress. These results could then be used to predict the creep that the material would likely experience during repeated exposure over time in a full-scale system.
“Creep testing is very time intensive,” Dentice said. “To test it under true conditions is not practical, but by creating a microcosm of the system we expect to see in application and studying how it behaves in a model problem, we can extrapolate to what we expect [the system] to do at scale. This method is relatively new and I’m very excited to learn how to work with it.”
Originally from Georgia, Dentice earned her bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. With a background in battery and solar cell research, she was prepared to work on electrochemical corrosion when she joined Wharry’s research group.
“I had the opportunity to either stay at my alma mater to study with a research group that was doing some really cool battery stuff that I enjoyed, or I could step out of my comfort zone and go to Purdue, where [Wharry] had been,” Dentice recalled. Ultimately, she chose to shift her research focus toward nuclear energy as a viable replacement for fossil fuels. When Wharry announced her move to Illinois the summer before Dentice’s program would begin, Dentice chose to follow.
Stepping out of her comfort zone would lead not just to her fellowship, but also to her selection as a participant in the NextProf Pathfinder workshop that took place in San Diego earlier this month. Sponsored by the University of Michigan, the University of California San Diego, and Georgia Tech, the workshop is intended to help prepare doctoral students for successful academic careers.
“I believe that it’s important to know your peers and understand where you exist in relation to the people in the community around you,” Dentice said of her motivation to become immersed in the workshop. “I don’t think you can just be an academic without also advocating for your work.”
Over the first year of her fellowship, Dentice will focus on collecting and characterizing samples before transitioning into irradiation experiments.
“[By year three], I hope to get into the nitty-gritty details of the mechanisms we’re looking at and how to design around them,” she said. “It’s not just that we will have observed [how they failed]. I hope to go a step further and bridge the gap between those temperature- and deformation-related concerns and the properties that we need the materials to have—for example, by identifying an alloy that might be a good candidate but hasn’t been studied extensively.”