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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.
Masami Ohnishi, Hodaka Osawa, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, Kai Masuda, Yasushi Yamamoto
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 3 | May 2001 | Pages 1211-1216
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A175
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A particle-in-cell calculation code was made to simulate the operation of an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion device. The computation includes the effects of ionization by electron impact. Several techniques to save computational time are introduced in this program code. One of them is time-dependent fine space meshes used in the regions where the particles concentrate. Several superparticles that have similar radial position as well as similar energy are merged, while one superparticle is divided into several particles with a somewhat different velocity when the total number of superparticles decreases. The methods enable more precise determination of the characteristics of an IEC device in a shorter time than by previous methods.