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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.
A. Iwamoto et al.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 427-432
IFE Target Design | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8939
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel layering of a cryogenic target with a conical laser guide such as the FIREX target is complicated because of its non-spherical symmetry appearance. To simplify the layering, a foam layer is planned to utilize as a supporting material of fuel. Ideally, the foam shell has self-fuel-layering ability at a liquid state owing to the capillarity of the foam material. For stable fuel compression in laser experiments, the fuel must be solid with a lower saturated pressure. The transition to a solid state expects to cause random fuel crystallization and voids from the density difference between liquid and solid. A volumetric heat load might help to finish fuel layering even in the foam shell. Solid fuel redistribution will ignore the foam boundary. Temperature control in the target, therefore, is required during the formation of a uniform layer. For the rough estimation of the target temperature, the possibility of the ANSYS code was confirmed compared with the experiment using a dummy target. Then, steady state temperature profiles of the FIREX target were calculated using the ANSYS code. Temperature control to practically realize a uniform solid fuel layer in the FIREX target is discussed.