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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.
Peng Li, Weiping Shen, Shuming Wang, Chulei Zhou, Shiliang Xu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 66 | Number 1 | July-August 2014 | Pages 142-149
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-709
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a W mockup with an interlayer of diamond/Cu (DC) composite material. As a joining interlayer, DC composite material has high thermal conductivity and accommodative coefficient of thermal expansion. By adjusting the thickness of the DC layer and comparing different forms of armor, the optimal design is the brush armor mockup with a 1-mm-thickness DC layer. The thermal-structural behavior of this mockup was analyzed under the steady-state and transient heat flux by using ANSYS Workbench. The calculated temperature and stress indicate that the mockup can tolerate 10 MW/m2 steady-state heat flux at most. Then a transient heat flux (300 MW/m2 for 5 ms) is loaded on the top surface upon steady-state heat flux of 8 MW/m2. The surface temperature instantly rises to 2300°C, but a cracking trend is not shown at the loaded surface.
