Structural materials of the new generation of nuclear reactors, fission as well as fusion, must often cope with high production rates of transmutation helium. Their testing hence requires either a powerful source of fast neutrons or a high-fluence ion-irradiation facility providing sufficient amounts of high-energy helium to investigate its effect on the material. Most ion irradiation studies, however, concentrate on basic effects such as defect evolution or bubble swelling in narrow near-surface regions modified by ion bombardment. Studies on bulk samples with a relatively thick implanted region, which would enable, for instance, micromechanical testing, are underrepresented. This gap might be filled by high-fluence multi-energy ion irradiations modifying several tens of micrometres of the investigated substrate. High-energy ion accelerators providing reasonable currents with energies of tens of MeV are rarely employed in such studies due to their scarcity or considerable beamtime costs. To contribute to this field, this article reports a unique single-beam He implantation experiment aimed at obtaining quasi-uniform displacement damage across >60 μm with the He/dpa ratio roughly one order of magnitude above the typical spallation neutron target irradiation conditions. Some technical aspects of this irradiation experiment, along with recent developments and upgrades at the 6 MV Tandetron accelerator of the Slovak university of technology in Bratislava, are presented.

Reliable transition of laboratory-developed gas-sensing nanomaterials into environmental monitoring systems remains limited by the lack of integrated testing platforms capable of reproducing realistic operating conditions while providing automated, high-quality sensor characterization. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for environmental gas sensor development centered on a custom-designed gas sensor chamber (GSC) and its connection to standalone measuring stations (sMSs) intended for smart city air quality monitoring. The GSC was developed as a dedicated platform for controlled evaluation of sensing nanomaterials through automated regulation of temperature, relative humidity, gas concentration, and pressure, combined with impedance measurements over a broad frequency range (10 Hz–100 kHz). The system integrates dedicated chamber hardware, environmental control loops, an LCR/impedance-based measurement unit, and in-house software for instrument control, data acquisition, synchronization of environmental and impedance data, and post-processing with visualization and correlation analysis. The functionality of the platform was demonstrated using graphene oxide-based nanocomposites deposited on interdigital electrodes and tested under variable parameters of temperature, humidity, and carbon monoxide concentration. The chamber enabled stable and reproducible extraction of frequency-dependent sensor responses and identification of optimal operating conditions for selected materials. Building on these results, the same sensing concept was translated into an energy-autonomous sMS architecture based on modular interdigital sensor elements, impedance-based indirect gas quantification, remote communication, and photovoltaic power support. By integrating material evaluation, environmental simulation, automated data handling, and field-oriented station design within a single workflow, the presented approach bridges the gap between laboratory gas sensor research and practical deployment in distributed smart city monitoring networks.

Rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) coated conductors are the suitable candidate materials for superconducting tapes on round tubes (TORTs) cables due to their excellent mechanical strength, high current-carrying capacity, and magnetic strength. It is commonly known that AC losses can be decreased when TORT cables are constructed using REBCO multi-filamentary tapes. However, the mechanical strength of these geometrically adjusted tapes is just as important when winding them into cables. The objective of this study was to understand the effects of the mechanical loading on the I _c (critical current) of the striated tapes with different filament geometries and, therefore, determine the safe strain limits. This work involved the preparation of various types of REBCO striated tapes through chemo-mechanical striating, as well as the deposition of stabilization multilayers. Subsequently, the striated tapes were bent at a lay angle of 45° over bender diameter from 13 mm to 1 mm, and current-carrying performance under self-field conditions at 77 K was measured. We observed that striated tapes with narrower gaps remained without I _c reduction to a bender diameter of 2 mm, while for non-striated tape there was a more significant decrease at 3 mm. Finally, the effect of filament geometrical irregularities on the mechanical performance of striated REBCO tapes were supported by finite element analysis and correlated with experimental results.