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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.
Philippe M. Bardet, Per F. Peterson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 163 | Number 3 | September 2008 | Pages 344-357
Technical Paper | Molten Salt Chemistry and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/NT163-344
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid fluoride salts and helium have desirable properties for use as working fluids for high-temperature (500 to 1000°C) heat transport in fission and fusion applications. This paper presents recent progress in the design and analysis of scaled thermal-hydraulic experiments for fluid mechanics and convective heat transfer in liquid salt and helium systems. It presents a category of heat transfer fluids and a category of light mineral oils that can be used for scaled experiments simulating convective heat transfer in liquid salts. By optimally selecting the length, velocity, average temperature, and temperature difference scales of the experiment, it is possible to simultaneously match the Reynolds, Froude, Prandtl, and Grashof numbers in geometrically scaled experiments operating at low-temperature, reduced length, and velocity scales. Mechanical pumping power and heat input are reduced to ~1 to 2% of the prototype power inputs. Helium fluid mechanics and heat transfer likewise can be simulated by nitrogen following the same procedure. The resulting length, velocity, temperature, and power scales for simulating helium are quite similar to those for the liquid salts, and the pressure scale is reduced greatly compared to the prototypical pressure scale. Steady state and transient heat transfer to a steel and graphite structure can be reproduced with moderate distortion using Pyrex and high-thermal-conductivity epoxies, respectively. Thermal radiation heat transfer cannot be reproduced, so the use of these simulant fluids is limited to those cases where radiation heat transport is small compared to convective heat transport, or where corrections for thermal radiation heat transfer can be introduced in models using convective heat transfer data from the simulant fluids. Likewise for helium flows, compressibility effects are not reproduced.