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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.
Kun Jie Yang, Yue-Lin Liu, Ning Liu, Peng Shao, Xu Zhang, Yuming Ma
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 76 | Number 5 | July 2020 | Pages 616-631
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1740556
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We performed systematically first-principles calculations to investigate interstitial H diffusion/permeation of temperature dependence in tungsten (W). The interstitial H diffusion is primarily through two nearest-neighbor tetrahedral positions and its activation energy increases significantly with rising temperature. Phonon vibration plays a decisive role in the behavior of the H activation energy with rising temperature. The H permeation activation energy also depends strongly on the temperature since it is the sum of the formation energy and diffusion activation energy of H. Our calculated H diffusivity/permeability with the temperature agree quantitatively with the reliable experimental data within the error range in W. The vacancy-capturing effect can give a reasonable explanation of the discrepancy between simulation and experiment. Although the diffusion/permeation activation energy and the prefactor strongly depend on the temperature, the diffusivity/permeability of H still obeys quasi-Arrhenius behavior with rising temperature, which is attributed to the compensation effect between the activation energy and the prefactor, i.e., the increment of the prefactor compensates directly the modification of the diffusivity/permeability in the case of a variation in the activation energy with rising temperature.