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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.
Chaung Lin, Chih-Ming Shen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 132 | Number 3 | December 2000 | Pages 389-402
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-4
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The neurocontrol technique was applied to control a pressurized water reactor (PWR) in load-follow operations. Generalized learning or direct inverse control architecture was adopted in which the neural network was trained off-line to learn the inverse model of the PWR. Two neural network controllers were designed: One provided control rod position, which controlled the axial power distribution, and the other provided the change in boron concentration, which adjusted core total power. An additional feedback controller was designed so that power tracking capability was improved. The time duration between control actions was 15 min; thus, the xenon effect is limited and can be neglected. Therefore, the xenon concentration was not considered as a controller input variable, which simplified controller design. Center target strategy and minimum boron strategy were used to operate the reactor, and the simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness and performance of the proposed controller.