Junliang is working on zirconium alloys to understand its irradiation damage and corrosion mechanisms which is of tremendous technological importance in the nuclear industry where oxidation of the zirconium fuel cladding limits the extent to which the fuel can be 'burnt'. He is using a variety of analytical techniques to study the oxide microstructure and irradiation defects including transmission Kikuchi diffraction (TKD), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and NanoSIMS.
Since submitting his DPhil thesis, he has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford as part of the Materials for Fusion and Fission Power Group (MFFP), Oxford Micromechanics Group and Oxford Nanoanalysis Group. He is responsible for the operation and management of the CAMECA NanoSIMS instrument, in addition to design related experiments, undertake microstructural analysis of nuclear materials not only on Zr fuel cladding alloys, but also on other materials of interest to the wider MFFP group (e.g. W, Ni alloys, stainless steels), and delivering training courses to new researchers in electron microscopy techniques.