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Latest News
Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
D. Navaei, X. R. Wang, M. S. Tillack, S. Malang, ARIES Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 233-237
Divertor & High Heat Flux Components | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12358
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The use of tungsten as a plasma-facing material necessitates a transition joint to the structural material of the primary coolant loop at some location in order to transport the coolant to the heat exchanger. A critical issue in transition joints is the thermal expansion mismatch between materials, which can lead to unacceptably high thermal stresses. Detailed 2D and 3D analyses were performed to study the behavior of a transition from tungsten to ferritic steel (FS) with an intermediate layer of tantalum, located outside of the high heat flux region. This paper describes the results of FEM analyses including primary and secondary stresses under various time-dependent loading conditions such as warm and cold shutdown, and allowing for inelastic behaviors leading to stress relaxation and ratcheting. The results show that the transition joint satisfies the design requirement on maximum accumulated principal strain during operation.
