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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.
David Bernat, Richard B. Stephens
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 473-476
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30804
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A long-standing problem in the characterization of multi-layered ICF capsules is the determination of the position of surfaces and interfaces from x-radiographic images. The accepted procedure for analyzing such images is to calculate the radial second derivative of x-ray absorption through a shell to locate the points of inflection in the absorption vs. radius plot which denote the layer interfaces. The computer routine developed in 1994 as an addition to NIH Image to perform this analysis was subject to unnecessary noise caused by calculating the radial finite second derivative (Δ2z/Δr2) from the interpolated radial points. Our most recent algorithm update solves this problem by directly determining the radial infinitesimal second derivative (d2z/dr2) of a cubic interpolation of surrounding pixels. This new procedure allows us to make reliable measurements of wall thickness vs. angle and layer uniformity, an improvement over the original method which only yielded layer thickness values averaged over all 360° of the shell.
