Dr Erin Valenzuela-Heeger
Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Staff profile for Dr Erin Louise Valenzuela-Heeger.
The advanced ceramics powering Britain’s clean energy ambitions
Ceramic composites designed for extreme environments are now under consideration for use inside fusion reactors.
Advanced ceramics are a critical but often-overlooked underpinning of many modern technologies. Few people realise, for example, that a single mobile phone contains thousands of tiny advanced ceramics components, essential for everything from regulating electrical signals to storing energy and managing heat.
Now the advanced ceramics being developed by Dr Erin Valenzuela‑Heeger, research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s department of Metallurgy and Materials, are being pressed into service in the UK’s energy security and clean power plans.
Dr Valenzuela‑Heeger works on ceramics designed for extreme environments. Her PhD focused on oxide ceramic matrix composites, of the kind used on the first American space shuttle, which are able to withstand extreme heat.
Dr Valenzuela‑Heeger works on Ceramic Metal Composites (CMCs) designed for extreme environments.
Those materials are now becoming central to the next phase of nuclear innovation, especially the development of nuclear fusion, where temperatures run significantly hotter than in a conventional fission reactor. Dr Valenzuela-Heeger has been advising industry on silicon carbide ceramic systems for use “directly inside a nuclear reactor”. The brief is unforgiving. As she recalls, they were “looking for materials that could withstand up to a million degrees celsius” — the temperature of hydrogen inside nuclear fusion reactors – and advanced ceramics are the only materials with a chance of handling that kind of heat.
Despite their resilience at high temperatures, ceramics remain a niche academic pursuit, and few British universities have a research focus on these materials. Birmingham, however, is a leading hub for advanced ceramics research, acting as a core academic partner in the multi-million-pound Midlands Industrial Ceramics Group (MICG) alongside major industry leaders like Rolls-Royce.
Dr Valenzuela-Heeger’s focus is materials reformulation, taking existing materials systems and working out how they can be made more efficiently and more sustainably. This has meant interrogating the science behind all elements of the ceramic forming process, all the way to the capabilities of ceramic matrix composites.
In fusion reactors these materials are used to build the inner walls and cooling channels that surround the burning plasma. Because they do not melt or warp under extreme heat and radiation, ceramic matrix composites keep the reactor's core contained while helping to transfer heat out to create electricity.
Left: A rheometer is used to test how a material flows.
Right: Ceramic Metal Composites (CMCs) often undergo bend testing to demonstrate their lack of brittle failure – this CMC has undergone bend testing and remains intact.
- Left: A rheometer is used to test how a material flows.
- Right: Ceramic Metal Composites (CMCs) often undergo bend testing to demonstrate their lack of brittle failure – this CMC has undergone bend testing and remains intact.
Dr Valenzuela-Heeger uses rheology, or the study of the flow of materials, to understand how these complex materials systems respond to different stresses and conditions during processing, and to define “what their limits are, what you can and can’t do to them in order to make them remain together," once it has been formed into a ceramic matrix composite.
Enterprise has been an enabler behind much of Dr Valenzuela‑Heeger’s industry-facing work, ensuring the contractual and administrative side of engagements to run smoothly. Having worked with them for around two and a half years, she describes the team as “reliable,” “quick,” and “always the first to be in my corner,” providing the institutional scaffolding that allows a specialist researcher to plug directly into industrial R&D without being derailed by process.