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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.
Y. T. Lee, A. Q. L. Nguyen, H. Huang, K. A. Moreno, K. C. Chen, C. Chen, M. A. Johnson, J. D. Hughes, R. C. Montesanti, D. W. Phillion
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 405-410
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-28
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A phase-shifting diffraction interferometer provides full surface mapping of National Ignition Facility (NIF) ablator capsules for surface finish and isolated defects. To integrate this new instrument into the NIF metrology work flow, the measurement must be both quick and accurate. In this work, we developed automated processing algorithms to streamline a large number of manual steps. This enables the process time to be reduced from 1½ days to 2 h per shell, thus meeting the NIF throughput requirement of 20 capsules/week. We also developed methods to quantitatively report the isolated defects and surface roughness in formats that can be benchmarked against the NIF specifications.
