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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.
R. Moreno, J. Vega, S. Dormido-Canto, A. Pereira, A. Murari, JET Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 69 | Number 2 | April 2016 | Pages 485-494
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST15-167
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced Predictor of Disruptions (APODIS) has been working in the JET real-time network since the beginning of the ITER-like wall (ILW) campaigns. APODIS is a data-driven system based on a multilayer structure of Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers. APODIS was trained with JET data corresponding to carbon wall discharges between April 2006 and October 2009, without any retraining in spite of its use with metallic wall discharges. This paper has two main parts. First, APODIS disruption prediction capabilities are evaluated during the ILW run period from July 2013 to October 2014. The results obtained from these experimental campaigns (more than 1059 nondisruptive discharges and 390 nonintentional disruptions) showed 2.46% false alarms and 85.38% success rate. Taking into account that ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) will work with a similar wall to the current ILW at JET, the purpose of the second part of this study is to compare predictors trained with data from JET ILW campaigns. The high computational cost that APODIS training requires and the great performance of SVM have motivated the development of a one-layer SVM predictor. Therefore, an APODIS version and a simpler one-layer predictor have been compared. They have been trained with data between September 2011 and July 2012 (1036 nondisruptive discharges and 201 nonintentional disruptions) and tested with experimental data in the period July 2013 to October 2014 (1051 nondisruptive discharges and 390 nonintentional disruptions). The one-layer predictor shows slightly better results than the APODIS structure.
