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Latest News
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.
Motonori Komura, Kaori Kamata, Tomokazu Iyoda, Keiji Nagai
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 257-264
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Highly ordered nanopore arrays were successfully fabricated using poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) and polymethacrylate with azobenzene mesogen in side chains [PMA(Az)] block copolymer film based on irradiation of 172-nm vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light. The block copolymer forms a highly ordered microphase-separated film with perpendicularly oriented PEO cylinders just by thermal annealing through a self-assembling process. We found that the etching rate of the PEO homopolymer was much higher than that of the PMA(Az) homopolymer at a chamber pressure of 102 Pa of atmosphere under VUV irradiation. The etching rate of the PEO component in the two systems of microphase separation and macrophase separation of the homopolymer blend crucially depended on the feature size of phase separation. In the PEO selective etching process of the block copolymer film, the water-contact angle of the film dramatically increased due to elimination of hydrophilic PEO. The resulting nanopore array film will be useful for low-density target materials.
