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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.
Jeffrey Doody, Robert Granetz, Bruce Lipschultz, Han Zhang, Peter Titus, Rui Vieira
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 320-324
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18097
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new outer divertor is being designed for installation on Alcator C-Mod. This divertor will be toroidally continuous such that the currents during a disruption will be driven in the toroidal direction and not cross Alcator's large toroidal field and it eliminates leading edges. However, currents will still cross the poloidal fields, and so it is important to properly predict the poloidal fields in the area of the divertor so that we can properly predict the loads on the divertor during a disruption. To that end, an ANSYS model has been built which can predict the fields and field transients in C-Mod given two inputs, the currents for the toroidal and poloidal field coils which come from measured data taken during a discharge, and the current in the plasma, which comes from another model that solves Maxwell's equations to reconstruct the plasma as 24 current carrying filaments. The advantage of using this method to predict fields is that it provides the ability to create a model based on actual measured data and to model whichever type of disruption, whether a midplane disruption or a vertical displacement event, is deemed necessary for the design. The ANSYS model then is able to predict the fields, including the shielding effects of the structures in the vessel, and the currents induced in the vessel and these structures. These results can then be mapped to a sub-model of the divertor to predict loading and stress during the disruption.