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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.
Georges Berthoud
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 1 | April 2000 | Pages 39-58
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3076
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A steam explosion is the result of the intense heat transfer that can occur when a cold and volatile fluid is brought into contact with a hot fluid. This heat transfer is linked to the fine fragmentation of the hot fluid, so on the explosion timescale, only part of the cold fluid is involved in this heat transfer. In this paper, two different ways of describing this heat transfer are presented. In the first one, i.e., the microinteraction concept, the amount of coolant involved is controlled by the fragmentation kinetics, while in the second one, it is controlled by phase change resulting from interfacial heat balance.
