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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.
Pengbo Zhang, Ruihuan Li, Chong Zhang, Jijun Zhao
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 106-111
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-746
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The preferential site, segregation and embrittlement properties of hydrogen (H) in a vanadium (V) &Sgr;3 (111) [110] grain boundary (GB) were investigated by first-principles calculations. The solution and segregation energy of H at different interstitial and substitutional sites are calculated. Energetically, H prefers to occupy the GB space rather than substitutional sites and can segregate to the GB with segregation energy of −0.08 eV. Hydrogen is an embrittler at the GB by producing an embrittlement energy of about 0.41 eV, in agreement with experimental observations. Charge density distributions indicate that there are no strong chemical bonds between an H atom and the adjacent V atoms in the GB, and the presence of H atom weakens the bond strength between surrounding V atoms.
