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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.
Haozhe Qiu, Kun Lu, Xiaojun Ni, Jianghua Wei, Songbo Han
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 78 | Number 8 | November 2022 | Pages 676-682
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2103312
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vacuum vessel is the core component of the Chinese Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR); its main function is to remove nuclear heating, provide safety shielding, and maintain a high-quality vacuum environment. Therefore, the safety of the vacuum vessel is of great significance to the CFETR, and examining its dynamic performance is necessary. However, the conventional finite element method takes too long to perform the dynamic analysis of the vacuum vessel, which greatly reduces the efficiency of the design and analysis. Based on the modal synthesis method, this study uses ANSYS software to establish a substructure model of the CFETR vacuum vessel. A modal analysis and harmonic response analysis are conducted, and their results are compared with those of the conventional finite element model. The results show that the substructure model not only has the same accuracy as conventional finite element models, but that it also greatly reduces the time of dynamic calculation.
