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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.
Jose-Carlos Rivas, Javier Dies
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 825-829
Computational Tools, Modeling & Validation | Proceedings of the Nineteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE) (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12488
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this contribution, an upgraded model for plasma-wall interaction in the AINA code is presented. The AINA code is a comprehensive hybrid code comprising a global balance plasma dynamics model and a radial and poloidal thermal analysis of in-vessel components. AINA is an evolution of the SAFALY code, which was initially adopted to assess ITER EDA plasma safety events and quantitatively investigate plasma instability events in nuclear fusion reactors such as ITER.The new erosion code module includes algorithms for the most relevant plasma wall interaction phenomena that will take place in the ITER vessel during the steady state of the normal operation. Physical sputtering, radiation enhanced sublimation (RES), and chemical erosion algorithms have been added to the previous thermal sublimation algorithm. The erosion results from these models have been benchmarked with results for ITER normal operation from the B2-Eirene code.The new erosion model had to be tested with external data for particle fluxes over the wall, because the AINA code does not presently have the ability to model those particle fluxes. However, with the new results, the impurity transport model parameters have been re-calibrated and some useful conclusions have been extracted.