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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. D. Boyd, A. M. May, P. Cofie, R. Martin
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 70 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 448-460
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-102
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to accommodate high thermal loading of single-side-heated (SSH) components, robust thermal management and high-heat-flux-removal approaches are essential to prevent thermal instability, thermal runaway, or a thermal spiral toward component failure. This paper presents multidimensional steady-state heat transfer measurements for a high-strength-copper SSH monoblock (heat sink) coolant flow channel with a helical wire insert (HI) and thermally developing internal laminar and turbulent water (coolant) flow. In the present case, the term “monoblock” refers to a solid parallelepiped with a central coolant flow channel along the axial centerline. In addition to producing local two-dimensional (axial and circumferential) flow boiling curves, multidimensional monoblock wall temperature distribution comparisons were made between flow channels with and without a HI. Further, flow boiling curves were measured up to ~4.0 MW/m2 at the inside flow channel wall. For the same inside flow channel temperature, the HI enhanced (1) the incident heat flux by >70% when compared with the flow channel without the insert and (2) the inside flow channel wall heat flux by up to a factor of 5 near the monoblock heated side and at all axial locations. These results can be used for validation of computational fluid dynamics codes.