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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.
R. E. Nygren, J. D. Miller
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 529-544
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30696
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Phase-III Outboard Pump Limiter is a heat sink made of pyrolytic graphite armor brazed to water-cooled copper tubes. Around the inner wall of the tube wall, some of the water can be in the subcooled boiling regime. The central issue analyzed here is how the heat flow in the tube changes when the thermal resistance along the heated portion of the tube is redistributed. Cracks or braze flaws in the joint between the tile and tube cause this redistribution. Severe cracks or flaws reduce the power-handling capability of this assembly because the local peak heat fluxes increase and, for a given critical heat flux (CHF), the safety margin decreases. There were some surprises. The increase in local peak heat flux for the most common type of flaw encountered in the fabrication of this limiter was negligible up to a flaw size of ∼50%. The examples presented are intended as a case study that illuminates the more general problem of how correlations for heat transfer and for CHF developed for uniform circumferential heating are applied to a case of one-sided heating.