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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.
Qingyi Tan, Xueyu Gong, Qianhong Huang, Yijun Zhong, Tao Yang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 1 | January 2022 | Pages 76-88
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2021.1936846
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A theoretical study on a ferrite stub tuner antenna system for ion cyclotron resonance frequency (ICRF) heating is discussed in this paper. High amounts of radio frequency power can be reflected at the antenna as a result of impedance mismatches arising from large changes in the plasma resistance during L- to H-mode transitions or edge localized modes. A fast-response ferrite stub tuner network has been proposed to mitigate these reflections by rapidly varying the impedance to match the rapid load changes on the ICRF antenna. This study numerically shows the influence relationship of the normalized mechanical length and the ratio of the ferrite part of two ferrite stubs on the regulating range of a biasing magnetic field of two stubs. A prematching stub can be used to reduce the standing-wave voltage on the ferrite tuners. The analysis of the ideal position and length of the prestub as well as the distance between the ferrite network and prestub are presented. Numerical simulations demonstrate that selecting ideal values for mechanical length and the ratio of the ferrite part of two ferrite stubs plays an important role in the impedance matching performance of the triple ferrite system during a large variation in plasma resistance.