Photo_A-QuainiAndrea Quaini is a research engineer who specializes in materials thermodynamics at the CEA (French Atomic Energy Agency) in Saclay, France.

He received his master’s degree in nuclear engineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy) in 2012. After an eight-months-traineeship in the Materials Research Unit of the JRC-ITU (Karlsruhe, Germany), where he studied the high temperature behavior of nuclear fuels, he started in 2012 a PhD at the CEA Saclay on the thermodynamics of the corium, a mixture of solid and liquid phases which is formed during a severe accident in a nuclear reactor. In collaboration with his team, he also conceived and developed a versatile experimental setup called ATTILHA, which allows high temperature measurements on ceramics, metals and oxide-metallic samples.  

Since 2012 Dr. Quaini has participated in the redaction of six scientific articles and 3 CEA technical reports. He has also presented his work at three international conferences. In 2013 he received the award for the best master’s degree thesis in physical science issued by the Lombardy Institute, Academy of Sciences & Literature Milan (Italy).

In his current position at CEA at the Laboratory of Modeling, Thermodynamics and Thermochemistry (LM2T), he continues to work on the thermodynamics of the chemical systems involved during severe accidents in nuclear reactors. In addition, he is in charge of the emissivity measurements on the steels for the primary vessel of the Na-cooled Fast Reactor Project ASTRID. He is also involved in surface tension measurements on stainless steels. More generally, he is interested in material science, high temperature measurements, development of experimental setups and thermodynamic calculations.