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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.
Ronald D. Boyd, Sr., Penrose Cofie, Qing-Yuan Li, Ali A. Ekhlassi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 41 | Number 1 | January 2002 | Pages 1-12
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST41-1-12
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the development of plasma-facing components for fusion reactors and high-heat-flux heat sinks (or components) for electronic applications, the components are usually subjected to a peripherally nonuniform heat flux. Even if the applied heat flux is uniform in the axial direction (which is unlikely), both intuition and recent investigations have clearly shown that both the local heat flux and the eventual critical heat flux (CHF) in this three-dimensional (3-D) case will differ significantly from similar quantities found in the voluminous body of data for uniformly heated flow channels. Although this latter case has been used in the past as an estimate for the former case, more study has become necessary to examine the 3-D temperature and heat flux distributions and related CHF. Work thus far has shown that the nonuniform peripheral heat flux condition enhances CHF in some cases.To avoid the excess costs associated with using electron or ion beams to produce the nonuniform heat flux, a new facility was developed that will allow 3-D conjugate heat transfer measurements and two-dimensional, local subcooled flow boiling heat flux and related CHF measurements.The configurations under study for this work consist of (a) a nonuniformly heated cylinder-like test section with a circular coolant channel bored through the center and (b) a monoblock that is a square cross-section parallelepiped with a circular drilled flow channel along the channel centerline. The theoretical or ideal cylinder-like test section would be a circular cylinder with half (-90 to 90 deg) of its outside boundary subjected to a uniform heat flux and the remaining half insulated. For the monoblock, a uniform heat flux is applied to one of the outside surfaces, and the remaining surfaces are insulated. The outside diameter of the cylinder-like test section is 30.0 mm, and its length is 200.0 mm. The monoblock square is 30.0 mm long. The inside diameter of the flow channel for both types of test sections is 10.0 mm. Water is the coolant. The inlet water temperature can be set at any level in the range from 26.0 to 130.0°C, and the exit pressure can be set at any level in the range from 0.4 to 4.0 MPa. Thermocouples were placed at 48 locations inside the solid cylinder-like or monoblock test section to obtain 3-D wall temperature variations and related local heat flux. Finally, the mass velocity can be set at any level in the range from 0.4 to 10.0 Mg/m2s for the 10.0-mm-diam channel.
