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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.
Sophie Charton, Frdric Dano, Jean-Yves Godefroy, Philippe Baclet
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 3 | May 2002 | Pages 242-247
Technical Paper | Fourteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST02-A17907
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The temperature distribution within the LMJ target has been extensively studied during the past three years regarding its constitutive materials, its geometry and its thermal environment within the LMJ experiment chamber. By the way, the target definition has evolved and a new architecture is now under consideration. A complete three-dimensional thermal simulation of this prototype has been lead. Its results are described in the paper. At the same time, our calculation efforts were focused on cavity hydrodynamics, especially concerned with overcoming free convection. Previous simulations results have indeed indicated that the thermal distribution is dependent on the filling pressure when the latter is over 10 kPa. Cavity filling CFD simulations are also presented and discussed.
