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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.
P. V. Subhash, Amit Kumar Singh, Hitesh Pandya, V. S. Divya, M. P. Aparna, T. K. Basitha Thanseem
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 1 | July 2017 | Pages 49-59
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2016.1273692
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For high-temperature tokamaks like ITER, electron cyclotron emission (ECE) measurements are expected to be affected by many factors like relativistic downshift, harmonics overlap, polarization scrambling, deviation of electron distribution from Maxwellian, etc. Many studies are already reported on the difference between ECE measurements and other measurements like Thomson scattering for existing high-temperature tokamaks like JET, TFTR, D-III-D, etc. As ITER is expected to reach a temperature of around 25 keV with a strong electron-ion coupling and additional heating, the deviation of the ECE radiation temperature from the electron temperature needs to be examined. This paper reports a parametric study on the effect of the presence of small superthermal populations on ECE measurements for ITER. A wide range of parametric space for superthermal parameters is used, assuming a bi-Maxwellian electron distribution, which obeys Kirchhoff law. The computational details and the results of the numerical studies are explained in this paper. Further, an attempt is also made to reconstruct the superthermal contributions from multiple oblique measurements, which is otherwise a difficult task. This reconstruction has been done through numerical calculations for two sets of measurements using detectors placed at same but opposite angles. Then, a scale factor is used to scale the difference between these two measurements to superthermal emission. The detailed procedure and possible physical explanations are presented. The dependence of this scale factor on the superthermal parameters is numerically studied, and a parametric equation is drafted between scale factor and superthermal parameters. The said equation contains two numerical constants, for which the values are numerically obtained from one set of simulations and verified with a number of calculations using different superthermal parameters.
