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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.
Fei Gao, Ram Devanathan, William J. Weber
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 574-578
Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The primary damage by displacement cascades in 3C-SiC at 300 K has been studied by molecular dynamics (MD). A large number of cascades, with energies from 0.2 to 50 keV, have been simulated in order to investigate the effects of energy in defect production and clustering. The surviving defects are dominated by C interstitials and vacancies. The number of Frenkel pairs increases with increasing cascade energy, but the efficiency of their production declines with increasing energy in a similar fashion to that found in metals. Although the number of antisite defects is smaller than that of Frenkel pairs, their production also increases with increasing cascade energy. Most surviving defects are single interstitials and vacancies, and the tendency of interstitials to form clusters is very week. The size of the interstitial clusters is very small, which shows significantly different behavior than obtained by MD simulations in metals. The current results provide the statistics of the primary damage states in SiC as a function of primary knock-on energy, which are important in upscaling these results to model behavior over longer time and length scales.