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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.
Xiaojun Ma, Qi Wang, Zongwei Wang, Xiangyu Wan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 6 | August 2021 | Pages 446-453
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1927624
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The oxygen concentration in the glow discharge polymer (GDP) capsule is one of the perturbations that most limit implosion quality. In order to investigate the feasibility of the Rutherford backscattering (RBS) technique for characterizing the oxygen concentration in a GDP capsule, the basic principle of RBS and the experimental conditions are introduced first. Then, the irradiation damage effect of incident ions on the GDP film is simulated numerically. The simulated results demonstrate that the GDP films will be damaged by the incident ions, and the vacancy damage dominates in irradiation modification. Finally, some GDP thin films are measured using RBS, and the oxygen concentration and its depth profile are obtained from the measured RBS spectrum. The simulated and experimental results prove that the oxygen concentration of GDP films can be measured precisely using RBS with an uncertainty of about 3.5%.
