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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.
Henri Weisen, Jari Varje, Paula Sirén, Zamir Ghani, JET Contributors
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 5 | July 2023 | Pages 602-609
Rapid Communication | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2164145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two related methods for inverting line-integrated measurements are presented in this research paper in the context of the recent deuterium-tritium experiments in the JET tokamak. Unlike traditional methods of tomography, these methods rely on making use of a family of model distributions defining a functional space within which a solution of the inversion problem is expected to exist. This is a stronger assumption than that underlying traditional methods of tomography and requires that suitable models for the expected distribution be available. In return, the methods offer computationally efficient and robust reconstructions. Regressive tomography, as applied to the data from the JET neutron cameras, involves calculating a set of 100 or more two-dimensional (2-D) neutron emission distributions in a representative variety of conditions using the ASCOT and AFSI Monte Carlo fast ion orbit and fusion reaction codes. The distributions are line integrated to represent synthetic measurements from the 19 channels of this two-camera system. An inversion matrix is then obtained by regressing the 2-D distributions corresponding to each of the voxels against these line integrals. The second method, direct regressive reconstruction, bypasses the calculation of line integrals altogether by regressing experimental camera data against calculated neutron emission distributions. This method does not require the cameras to be calibrated, not even relatively between channels. The inversion matrices obtained by any of the two methods can then be used to provide neutron emission profiles for which ASCOT/AFSI calculations are not available.