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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.
Chan Eok Park, Jong Ho Choi, Gyu Cheon Lee, Sang Yong Lee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 77-93
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1501990
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The system thermal-hydraulic code SPACE adopts a multidimensional two-fluid, three-field model to simulate two-phase-flow phenomena encountered during various anticipated transients and postulated accidents of pressurized water reactors. The applicable mesh systems include structured/staggered and unstructured/collocated ones. The staggered mesh system is based on the orthogonal hexahedral shape of cells and their surrounding faces, but it is generalized to describe not only multidimensional Cartesian meshes but also cylindrical meshes and one-dimensional pipe flow networks. The unstructured/collocated mesh system is used to represent more complex geometry using hexahedron, tetrahedron, pyramid, or prism shapes of cells. The structured/staggered mesh system hydraulic solver and the unstructured/collocated mesh system hydraulic solver are merged into a unified version of SPACE so that those hydraulic solvers can analyze simultaneously a complicated system comprising several structured and unstructured mesh blocks. In this paper, the governing equations, mesh systems, and numerical formulations for SPACE are introduced, and the application results are presented for several conceptual problems including the connection of heterogeneous mesh blocks.
