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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
D. H. Edgell, R. S. Craxton, L. M. Elasky, D. R. Harding, S. J. Verbridge, M. D. Wittman, W. Seka
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 717-726
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1469
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Backlit optical shadowgraphy is the primary diagnostic for hydrogenic ice-layer characterization in cryogenic targets at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE). Reflection and refraction of light passing through the ice layer produce characteristic rings on the image. The position of the most prominent of the shadowgraph rings, known as the bright ring, can be resolved to ~0.1-pixel rms, corresponding to less than 0.2 m for typical target shadowgraphs. The LLE target characterization stations use two camera angles and target rotation to record target shadowgraphs from many different views (typically 48) and build a three-dimensional (3-D) topology of the ice layer. The standard method of bright-ring analysis using spherically symmetric ray-trace calculations to determine the ice surface is limited to mode numbers up to around [script l]max = 10 by gaps in the data and the effects of ice-layer asymmetries that invalidate the symmetric ray trace calculations. A 3-D ray-tracing model has been incorporated into the shadowgraph analysis. The result is a self-consistent determination of the hydrogen/vapor surface structure for cryogenic targets up to higher-mode numbers ([script l]max = 16). This reduces the standard deviation between the measured bright rings and those predicted for the 3-D ice surface (by 45% from 1.5 m to 0.8 m in the example shown).