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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.
V. Widak, P. Norajitra, J. Reiser
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 2 | August 2009 | Pages 1028-1032
Divertors and High Heat Flux Components | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 2) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A9046
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Within the EU power plant conceptual study (PPCS), a modular He-cooled divertor concept (Ref. 1) has been investigated at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe to achieve a heat flux of at least 10 MW/m2. The divertor conceptual design is based on the use of a tile made of tungsten, a structural element made of tungsten alloy, and a steel cartridge. The cooling of the divertor module is realized by an impingement of helium jets (10 MPa, 600 °C) flowing through an array of small jet holes located at the top of the cartridge, able to remove the high heat flux incident on the top surface of the tiles.In this paper a modular design of a helium cooled divertor is introduced. A method of design examination regarding the cooling capability and the component stresses are pointed out. The method is based on the use of a combined system of modern computer tools. For the 3D design construction, the CAD program CATIA V5 was utilized. The simulation calculations were performed in two steps: thermo-hydraulic CFD calculations using the ANSYS CFX tool and thermo-mechanical FEM calculations with the ANSYS code. The CFD computations were done taking into account the design geometry with an appropriate meshing and the boundary conditions, i.e. the defined heat flux, the helium pressure and temperature at the inlet. Among other things, the heat-transfer-coefficients received from the CFD runs were then used for the following FEM analyses. The simulation results and a potential of design improvement will be discussed.