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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.
Barbora Gulejová, Richard Pitts, David Tskhakaya, David Coster
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 48-55
doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although the most complex currently available fluid-neutral Monte-Carlo plasma boundary code package, SOLPS, has been a major player in the ITER divertor design, it has not yet been systematically used for the study of kinetic phenomena such as ELM transients. This paper investigates the relevance of fluid code results for transients, in particular at the targets where kinetic effects are most manifest, by comparing power and particle fluxes at the targets from SOLPS5 time-dependent simulations of TCV Type III ELMs with those obtained from dedicated Particle-in-Cell (PiC) kinetic transport code (BIT1) simulations. Although reasonable agreement is found in terms of the absolute magnitude of total heat fluxes, the arrival of the ion pulse at the target from upstream is significantly faster in SOLPS than expected on the basis of sonic transit times (as also seen in PiC). Adjustments of kinetic heat flux limiters to render the heat fluxes more convective in SOLPS are necessary in order to correct for this discrepancy. Moreover, because SOLPS does not account for the transfer of heat from electrons to ions inside the sheath, correction terms to the electron and ion power fluxes at the targets are required in SOLPS in order to better match PiC results. However, it does not appear possible within the scope of these sensitivity studies to simultaneously achieve expected delays and ion-electron power sharing in the fluid simulations.