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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.
J. H. Jeong, S. Park, H. J. Do, W. Namkung, M. H. Cho, Y. S. Bae, M. Joung, W. S. Han, J. S. Kim, S. J. An, H. L. Yang, S. Kubo, H. Takahashi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 57 | Number 3 | April 2010 | Pages 274-280
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST10-A9470
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In order to transmit a wave efficiently in an electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system, it is important to suppress mode conversion loss caused by coupling in the matching optics unit and misalignment in the transmission line. To understand the cause of mode conversion loss, it is necessary to analyze the mode content in an oversized circular corrugated waveguide. For mode analysis of the propagating wave in the corrugated waveguide, several methods based on the phase-retrieval process and the iterative process are suggested. But, in the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research 84-GHz ECH transmission line, a well-known method using burn patterns was used for better coupling of the output beam from the gyrotron onto the axis of the corrugated waveguide by adjusting a large ellipsoidal mirror in an L-shaped chamber, a so-called L-box. During the adjustment of the mirror in the L-box, evidence of the existence of higher modes other than HE11 was found. For the mode content study, the radiation intensity distribution was measured using thermal paper as a function of the distance along the waveguide at a high power level. The mode content of the wave was estimated by comparing the measured burn patterns and calculated patterns at different locations. This paper describes the results of mode content estimation using burn pattern images as a function of the mode mixture ratio.