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Latest News
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.
Alexandre Choux, Lise Barnouin, Ludovic Reverdy, Marc Theobald
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 2 | March 2018 | Pages 127-131
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1406247
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Targets experimented on the Laser Megajoule (LMJ) facility are composed of amorphous hydrogenated carbon capsules. Some of them present rippled surface features like sinusoidal functions. Other experimented targets are hohlraum-containing capsules. The main difficulty when analyzing the machined capsules is to characterize the feature’s orientation and the sinusoidal shape featured in the capsule thickness by laser machining. For the capsule enclosed by the hohlraum, the main challenge is to characterize the capsule centering inside the assembled hohlraum. X-ray tomography is used to realize measurement, and obtained results are presented in this paper.
