Role at ANSTO
Dr Warwick Payten is a senior research scientist in the nuclear fuel cycle group at ANSTO. He is one of Australia's leading experts in determining the remaining operational life of materials in high-temperature environments. He has more than 25 years of experience undertaking the finite element analysis of structures and components. During his career, he has authored over 50 papers and holds two patents.
He has been heavily involved in structural integrity and condition monitoring projects for the power and petrochemical industry, and has considerable experience in the areas of thermal, creep fatigue and fracture mechanics modelling.
As part of his work with the power industry, he has developed RemLife a software package that is a simulator for nuclear, solar thermal, coal and gas combined cycle power stations. It calculates the damage from unit cycling and then assesses the costs of the chosen cycling regime. RemLife enables managers and engineers in the power generation industry to optimise asset productivity and maximise life-cycle profitability for their plants in rapid time frames. This is currently being used by a number of stations within Australia and overseas. Recently the software was sold to an ASX 100 company, ALS Global, in a long term collaboration agreement.
While at ANSTO, Warwick has developed links with international organisations including British Energy/EDF, and the EPRI working group on Creep-Fatigue Interaction.
Payten contributed to the mechanical, seismic and dynamic design and assessment of the new nuclear research reactor OPAL.
Prior to this, he was employed by the Metallurgy Section of the Electricity Commission of NSW for several years and has considerable inspection experience at various power stations in Australia.
Expertise
- High-Temperature Material behaviour
- Structural Integrity
- Remaining Life Assessment
- Fracture Mechanic
- Creep and Fatigue Initiation
- Powder diffraction
- High-pressure sample environments
- Crystal structure solution
- planetary science and
- Science communication.
Qualifications & Achievements
B.App.Sc Hons (Material Science)
PhD (Material Science/Engineering)