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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.
Hooman Javidnia, Jin Jiang, Majid Borairi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 174-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4084
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents the development of a flexible and user-friendly reactor core dynamic model of a CANadian Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) reactor for control system applications using the commercial simulation package MATLAB/SIMULINK. The reactor core is divided into 14 zones, and a set of coupled kinetics equations are developed to describe the dynamic behavior of the zones. The interaction between neighboring zones is characterized in terms of coupling coefficients, which basically describe the possibility of a neutron born in one zone causing a nuclear reaction in another zone. The model also includes the dynamics of the xenon and iodine. Nondimensionalized representations of the reactor dynamic model are derived in detail. It is demonstrated that vectorization of dynamic variables can significantly simplify the modeling and simulation process for a multizone reactor. Transient behavior of the reactor has been simulated using the developed model.
