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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.
Kyekyoon(Kevin) Kim, Qichen Feng
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 5 | December 1995 | Pages 1790-1796
Technical Paper | Inertial Confinement Fusion Targets | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30414
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel gas-dynamic levitation technique has been developed to facilitate noncontact coating of spherical ICF targets. Using this technique three metal balls 450 µm, 650 µm and 950 µm in diameter were levitated very stably for several hours, with the balls rotating continuously. Unlike the conventional gas-dynamic levitation scheme in which a single gas-emitting fixture, placed below an object, lifts it up and contains it in a confined volume, the present scheme relies on two fixtures, one placed under and the other above the object. The bottom fixture, as is with the conventional scheme, is a gas emitter; however, the top one is a gas collector shaping the flow field around the object so as to confine the object near the axis of symmetry of the levitation system. As a result, the present system exhibits excellent stability and robustness, and is immune to such external disturbances as nonuniform temperature fields and air currents, and small changes in the levitation gas pressure. The apparatus is inexpensive to fabricate and simple to operate. The details of the apparatus and the preliminary data demonstrating the capability of the levitation scheme are presented. A target coating method, compatible with the present target levitation scheme and suitable for uniform coating of ICF targets, is indicated.