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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.
T. Andreeva, J. Kißlinger
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 2 | August 2006 | Pages 258-261
Technical Paper | Stellarators | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1243
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, which is currently under construction in Greifswald, Germany, is a five-period machine, and many of the planned operational plasma scenarios are characterized by the rotational transform /2 = 1 at the plasma boundary. Such magnetic configurations are particularly sensitive to the symmetry-breaking perturbations caused by fabrication and assembly errors, which can occur at different stages of the device construction. Analysis of nonplanar and planar winding packs (WPs) fabricated up to the present time has confirmed the existence of a systematical portion in the manufacturing deviations. The level of the magnetic field perturbation due to the statistical part in manufacturing errors can be expected to be of order 1 × 10-4 at the end of the WP production. Validation of different assembly steps and the resulting distortion of the current path will be done on the basis of the reference point measurements. The influence of the assembly errors and corresponding uncertainties on the magnetic field perturbation is estimated for some cases.