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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.
Sule Ergun, Jason G. Williams, Lawrence E. Hochreiter, Hergen Wiersema, Marcel Slootman, Marek Stempniewicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 156 | Number 1 | October 2006 | Pages 69-74
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT06-A3774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical heat flux (CHF) at a natural boiling condition is an important phenomenon for a research reactor having a small-hydraulic-diameter geometry under a large-break loss-of-coolant accident condition. Accurately predicting the CHF under this condition is very important; therefore, the CHF models used in the best-estimate codes must be validated using appropriate experimental data for a given geometry. The present work focuses on validating the CHF calculations and models within the COolant Boiling in Rod Arrays-Two Fluid (COBRA-TF) code by simulating two sets of experiments, which were performed in tubes and annuli with different length-to-diameter ratios. In this work, the cocurrent upflow and downflow correlations developed by Mishima and Nishihara and Holowach et al. and Zuber correlations for the CHF used in COBRA-TF are validated against the experimental data obtained by Monde and Yamaji and Islam et al. Conclusions on the predictive capability of COBRA-TF for the CHF calculations for small-hydraulic-diameter geometry under natural boiling conditions are provided with the description of the correlations and models used.