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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.
N. H. Balshaw, Y. Krivchenkov, G. Phillips, S. Davis, R. Pampin-Garcia
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 661-665
ITER | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8984
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Many of the ITER diagnostic systems will be mounted in the equatorial and upper ports of the torus, supported plugs support the diagnostics and provide functions of baking, cooling, and neutron shielding. They must operate reliably in the demanding ultra-high vacuum, high radiation environment of the ITER tokamak for many years.Recent work on the mechanical design of the equatorial port plugs is reported, including a proposal for a new conceptual design, which uses the lid of the port plug as a structural member. The design of a complex component like this is an iterative process considering the interaction of the features of the port plug structure, neutron shielding components and diagnostic components with the electromagnetic forces induced in the structure by plasma disruptions.These electromagnetic forces are recognised to dominate the requirements for the strength of the structure. Much work has been carried out on this topic by other people, but generally this has been based on models which make assumptions about the boundary conditions. An ANSYS electromagnetic model of a half-sector of ITER has now been developed by UKAEA, to study the induced forces in the equatorial port plugs.
