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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.
Jian-Yu Zhu, Hao-Wei Dai, Wen-Xiong Xie
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 172-180
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-115
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Algorithms for locating the neutron source by neutron time-of-flight (TOF) measurement are established and discussed for monoenergetic and multienergetic neutrons in this paper. For the monoenergetic neutron source, the location of the source could be estimated by locating the position where the variance between the actual TOF and the calculation gains its minimum. For multienergetic neutrons the maximum likelihood (ML) method has been applied to process the time-correlation measurement. The efficiencies of location estimations are studies with simulations. In the simulations, the TOFs are acquired by time-correlation measurement of three neutron detectors surrounding the suspected area of the neutron source. The results indicate that the location of monoenergetic neutron sources could be estimated by the neutron TOF acquired by three detectors, while for multienergetic neutron sources, the likelihood method could be used to locate the most probable location, as well as its possible distribution of location. As the result of large-scale simulation and comparison, the ML estimation method is more effective than traditional methods, especially in conditions of low count rates or low resolution.