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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.
P. W. Humrickhouse, P. Calderoni, B. J. Merrill
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 4 | November 2011 | Pages 1564-1567
Interaction with Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12732
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A number of additions have been made to the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code Fluent in order to model hydrogen permeation. In addition to fluid dynamics, Fluent solves for heat transfer in coupled solid and fluid regions, and solves advection-diffusion equations for scalar quantities such as hydrogen concentration. The latter have been modified with additional code to satisfy Sievert's Law at solid-fluid interfaces and allow for temperature dependent diffusivity and permeability.The method has been employed to model the Tritium Heat Exchanger (THX) experiment at INL, which investigates hydrogen permeation in helium and candidate structural materials for high temperature gas reactor heat exchangers. The Arrhenius law parameters used in Fluent for Inconel 617 are initially determined via a simplified analytical method, and the resulting model predictions compare favorably with experiment data.
