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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.
Ivan Di Piazza, Leo Bühler
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 38 | Number 2 | September 2000 | Pages 180-189
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The buoyancy-driven magnetoconvection in the cross section of an infinitely long vertical square duct is investigated numerically using the CFX code package. The implementation of a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) problem in CFX is discussed, with particular reference to the Lorentz forces and the electric potential boundary conditions for arbitrary electrical conductivity of the walls. The method proposed is general and applies to arbitrary geometries with an arbitrary orientation of the magnetic field. Results for fully developed flow under various thermal boundary conditions are compared with asymptotic analytical solutions. The comparison shows that the asymptotic analysis is confirmed for highly conducting walls as high velocity jets occur at the side walls. For weakly conducting walls, the side layers become more conducting than the side walls, and strong electric currents flow within these layers parallel to the magnetic field. As a consequence, the velocity jets are suppressed, and the core solution is only corrected by the viscous forces near the wall. The implementation of MHD in CFX is achieved.