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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.
M. Dalle Donne, A. Goraieb, G. Piazza, F. Scaffidi-Argentina
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 38 | Number 3 | November 2000 | Pages 310-319
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Beryllium Technology for Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST00-A36144
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For the next generation fusion reactors with a ceramic breeder blanket the use, as a neutron multiplier, of either a binary bed of large (≈ 2 mm) and small (≈ 0.1–0.2 mm) beryllium pebbles or a single size bed made of 1 mm or 2 mm pebbles is foreseen. The heat transfer parameters of such a binary pebble bed, namely the thermal conductivity and the heat transfer coefficient to the containing wall, have been investigated previously in the experimental device PEHTRA available at FZK. The experiments allowed to measure the effect of the bed temperature and of constraint exerted by the containing walls. The constraint is defined by the bed interference, i.e. the difference in the radial expansion between bed and the constraining walls related to the bed thickness (Δℓ/ℓ). However, with the PEHTRA experiments, it was only possible to achieve a Δℓ/ℓ value of 0.1 % .1 A new experimental rig (SUPER-PEHTRA) has been constructed at FZK, which allows to achieve Δℓ/ℓ values of 0.3 % and to measure the pressure of the expanding bed on the containing walls. First experiments with a binary bed have been performed.2 The present paper reports on further experiments with binary beds and the establishing of equations correlating the data obtained for the present binary beds and for the binary bed experiments described in Ref. [2].