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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.
M. Z. Hasan, T. Kunugi, M. Seki, M. Yokokawa, H. Ise, H. Kaburaki, The ARIES team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 19 | Number 3 | May 1991 | Pages 908-912
Advanced Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST91-A29460
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The response of ARIES-I divertor plate to hard plasma disruptions has been analyzed numerically by a two-dimensional transient heat transfer code. For ARIES-I, the estimated thermal quench time is 0.3 msec and the average heat flux is 8.8×109 W/m2 with a peaking factor of 5. The divertor plate is made of 2.5 mm diameter SiC tubes with wall thickness of 0.5 mm and coated with a 2 mm layer of tungsten on the plasma facing side. The analysis predicts a total material erosion per disruption of about 111 µm without vapor shield and 48 µm with a simple vapor-shield model. The designated 1 mm of the tungsten coating for disruption is expected to last about 20 disruptions. A two-dimensional thermo-fluid dynamic analysis of the melt layer under the influence of buoyancy and surface tension forces has been performed. The results tend to imply that the melt layer is relatively unaffected during the disruption, especially for short thermal quench time.
