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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.
S. O. Kucheyev, J. M. Lenhardt
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 73 | Number 3 | April 2018 | Pages 293-297
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1392205
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid hydrogen confined in pores of nanofoams crystallizes at lower temperatures than in the unconfined, bulk state. Here, we summarize results of our recent systematic relaxation calorimetry studies of the liquid–solid phase transition of hydrogen and deuterium in various materials with open-cell pores. These include spinodal-decomposition-derived silica glasses and nanoporous gold, conventional silica aerogels, and carbon foams with ligaments made from nanotubes and graphene sheets, all of which were studied previously. We present new hydrogen thermoporometry data for polymeric norbornene-based aerogels. Results show that hydrogen freezing temperatures inside all the porous materials studied are depressed. The average depression of the freezing point scales linearly with the ratio of the internal surface area to the pore volume. The average freezing point depression is limited to ≲1.6 K for foams with monolith densities ≲50 mg·cm. Details of the freezing behavior, however, depend nontrivially on the choice of the porous material and on the hydrogen-filling fraction, reflecting phenomena that are beyond the Gibbs-Thomson formalism and pointing to the complexity of pore architectures in the low-density materials of interest to thermonuclear fusion energy applications.