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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.
Z. J. Bergstrom, M. A. Cusentino, B. D. Wirth
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 71 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 122-135
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/FST16-121
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fusion reactor materials experience high ion fluxes and operating temperatures, which will ultimately produce subsurface helium and hydrogen bubbles in the tungsten divertor that can cause surface degradation and impact core plasma performance. Molecular dynamics simulations have been used to evaluate the behavior of hydrogen and helium near a 2-nm bubble or void below a tungsten surface as a function of surface orientation, temperature, gas atom concentration, initial hydrogen distribution, and depth below the surface. A clear tendency for hydrogen to segregate to the bubble-matrix interface is observed in these simulations, regardless of the initial spatial distribution of the hydrogen or simulation parameters. This segregation is due in part to a local minimum in the hydrogen energy at the periphery of the bubble. Further work is required to fully characterize the mechanism of this behavior and to assess the quantities of hydrogen in the bubble and at the bubble periphery.