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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.
Jun Soo Lee, Dong Won Lee, Goon Cherl Park
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 544-548
Blanket Design and Experiments | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12439
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Through consideration of the requirements for a DEMO-relevant blanket concept, Korea (KO) has proposed a He-Cooled Molten Lithium (HCML) Test Blanket Module (TBM) for testing in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). To validate the safety of the HCML TBM design concept and guarantee high efficiency of the power conversion system, an evaluation of the heat transfer capability of the gas coolant in a high Reynolds number regime should precede this test. In this study, a thermal hydraulic test with a high-pressure nitrogen gas loop was performed and a thermal hydraulic analysis was carried out with the commercial CFD code Fluent 6.3.26 and the system code GAMMA (Gas Multicomponent Mixture Analysis) under the same test conditions. In the experiment, a single TBM First Wall (FW) mock-up made from the same material as the KO TBM, ferritic martensitic steel, was used, and the test was performed at pressures of 11, 19 and 29 bar and under various flow rates ranging from 0.63 to 2.44 kg/min. As one-side of the mock-up was heated by a furnace heater at a constant temperature, the wall temperatures were measured by installed thermocouples, with the measured temperatures showing strong parity with code results simulated under the same test conditions. Even with the system code using the modified Dittus-Boelter correlation, which was developed under a different heating condition, the three-dimensional approach of the system code is capable of estimating a one-sided heating condition in a fusion application.