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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.
Yunmin Yang, Naoto Sekimura, Hiroaki Abe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 2 | September 2003 | Pages 460-464
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A378
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, MD simulations of compression process were carried for copper lattices with an interstitial type Frank loops. Slipping of prismatic dislocations was not observed for loops whose size ranges from 0.5nm to 3.6nm. For loops with a size of 0.5nm, atoms in loops were squeezed into the neighboring layer to form crowdion bundles along <110> directions, and then swept away by further deformation. For loops larger than 2nm, the movements of atoms in faulted layer were not homogeneously in one direction during elastic deformation process, its extrinsic stacking was broken into two intrinsic ones exist on two successive planes. After yielding the slipping on these two successive planes accommodated the plastic deformation and broke up the loop. The results in this work proved that, for low stacking fault energy FCC metals such as copper and stainless steel, to describe their deformation mechanism after neutron or heavy ion irradiation, unfaulting and prismatic slipping mechanism cannot apply for interstitial Frank loops, and the behavior of these loops have dependence on their size and Schmid factor.