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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.
Bin Chen, Jiangang Li, Yanlan Hu, Teng Wang, Chao Zhou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 2 | February 2020 | Pages 95-101
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2019.1690927
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-temperature superconductor (HTS) current leads are important components of the EAST and CFETR tokamaks, which are responsible for operating the high parametric current. HTS current leads are made of Bi-2223/Ag-Au alloy tapes, which have the characteristics of slow quench propagation speed and weak quench signal. Traditional thermometers are easily damaged by the high voltage from the current leads, and the terminal voltage signal cannot reflect the hot spot changes of current leads in real time. In this paper, a novel quench detection method based on optical frequency domain reflection technology is proposed. Temperature variations of HTS can be obtained in real time by demodulating the Rayleigh scattered spectrum from the distributed optical fiber attached to the surface of HTS stacks. This paper describes a quenching experiment for one pair of 1-kA small current leads. The external thermal disturbance is increased to explore the quench propagation of HTS current leads under the condition of a self-field, 77 to 80 K air and conduction combined cooling method. From the experimental results, the temperature distribution map of the whole HTS lead is obtained. Compared with the quench voltage, the spectral shift of the fiber appeared to be about 2 s ahead, and the hot spot position can be located with 1-cm accuracy.
