Ceramic Coatings for Accident Tolerant (Nuclear) Fuels (Cabrioli Mattia - PhD STEN)
The literature review was targeted to the analysis of the potentiality of different search engines and databases for the collection of research papers on ceramic barrier coatings. The additional requirement concerned the application of those coatings to nuclear power plants, with the aim of enhancing the safety and reliability of plants.
At first, Web Of Science was used. By using the keywords “accident tolerant fuel cladding”, then adding “coating” and “ceramic” in two different refinement steps, 76, 22 and 3 documents were found. In this case, the search parameters allowed the reduction in the number of documents. However, information was lost with this search, since the three residual articles treated only few specific coating materials and coating technologies among the existing possibilities. Complementary information in this sense was found by using the keywords “accident tolerant fuel cladding” and searching for review articles. Only 3 reviews were found, though containing useful indication on the wide variety of materials and methods employed.
Semantic Scholar was used afterwards, with the same process already described. In this case, 164, 56 and 27 documents were found respectively. The higher number of documents included, unfortunately, was misleading. Indeed, many articles including only “cladding” word, for example, in title or body of the document were still present in the list.
Google Scholar, with the number of 686, 459 and 293 documents found with this methodology offered a wider view. On the other hand, additional refinements could have been performed in order to categorize the articles in macro-areas such as type of ceramic material employed, type of experimental evidence and characterization techniques adopted. Many articles including only one or two of the input keywords were still present in the list.
Finally, Scopus was employed to get the number of 116, 85, 47 documents during the process. In this case, the number of articles and topics covered by them was found to be optimal for the review of ceramic materials and processes involved in the sector of accident tolerant fuels.
To conclude, the keywords adopted appeared to be useful for a first approach to the literature concerning accident tolerant fuels. Scopus was found to be the optimal search engine because of the balance between number of articles and consistency with the selected input words.