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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.
Xianfei Wen, Andreas Enqvist
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 11 | November 2019 | Pages 1480-1487
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1603503
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Cs2LiYCl6:Ce3+ (CLYC) scintillator is being widely employed in nuclear physics, planetary science, radiation environmental monitoring, nuclear security, and nonproliferation communities. The time resolution of a 1 × 1-in. CLYC scintillation detector is reported in this paper. It was measured by the use of a high sampling rate DRS4 waveform digitizer and an EJ-309 liquid scintillation detector. The digitizer was first characterized with regard to its intrinsic time resolution and then the time resolution of the EJ-309 detector was investigated. It served as a reference detector in the time resolution measurements for the CLYC detector. The time pick-off techniques used were the constant fraction discrimination and leading edge discrimination methods. In addition, the Savitzky-Golay filter was used to further improve the measured time resolutions. This filter was shown to be an effective approach to improving time resolution when the signal-to-noise ratio is low.