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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.
Lázaro Emílio Makili, Jesús A. Vega Sánchez, Sebastián Dormido-Canto
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 62 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 347-355
Selected Paper from the Seventh Fusion Data Validation Workshop 2012 (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST12-A14626
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper addresses the problem of finding a minimal and good enough training data set for classification purposes by using active learning and conformal predictors. Active learning means to have control in the selection process of training samples instead of choosing them in a random way. To this end, active learning methodologies look for establishing selection criteria in order to find out the samples that show better discrimination capabilities. In the present case, conformal predictors have been used for these purposes. Results will be presented in a five-class classification problem with images. The features are the vertical detail coefficients of the Haar wavelet transform at level four to diminish the sample dimensionality by reducing the spatial redundancy of the images. The active selection of training sets (through the reliability measures of a conformal predictor) allows the improvement of the classifiers. Here, the word "improvement" refers to obtaining higher generalization properties thereby avoiding overfitting. Support vector machines classifiers, in the one-versus-the-rest approach, have been used as the underlying classifiers.