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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.
Mong J. Yu, Chan S. Kim, Kune Y. Suh
Nuclear Technology | Volume 157 | Number 3 | March 2007 | Pages 261-276
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-A3817
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Quenching experiments were performed to examine the effect of inclination angles and curvature on film-boiling heat transfer. The experiments employed a 294-mm-diam, 30-mm-thick stainless steel downward-facing hemisphere to substantiate the local film-boiling mechanism along the angular surface. Forty-six thermocouples were installed from 0 deg (the bottom) to 85 deg (near the equator) at three intervals: 10 deg (0 to 10 deg), 5 deg (10 to 55 deg), and 2.5 deg (55 to 85 deg) near the outer (1.5 mm) and inner (5 mm) surfaces of the test section. The angular film-boiling heat fluxes and heat transfer coefficients were obtained from the two-dimensional transient temperature profiles by solving a transient heat conduction equation in spherical coordinates. The test results were compared with those of the laminar and interfacial wavy film-boiling analysis. Undulating heat transfer coefficients were observed from the experimental data as the angle increases. These phenomena intensified near the equator, which has higher inclination angles than near the bottom. It was shown that the Helmholtz instability limited the vapor film thickness. In addition, the boiling mechanism on the downward-facing hemisphere was visualized utilizing a digital camera.