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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.
Andrej Prošek, Boštjan Končar, Matjaž Leskovar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1661-1674
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2018.1562820
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prediction of highly turbulent flows using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools is not an easy task. Besides the uncertainty in the choice of turbulence model parameters, the physical properties of the fluid and experimental boundary conditions also can be largely affected by uncertainties. The objective of the study is uncertainty quantification of CFD simulation to obtain figures of merits, downstream velocity, and turbulence kinetic energy. The water-mixing experiment in the GEneric MIxing Experiment (GEMIX) facility performed at Paul Scherrer Institute is used as a benchmark case. The NEPTUNE_CFD code that solves Reynolds-averaged Navier Stokes equations with k-eps turbulence model has been used to perform a series of simulations. For uncertainty quantification with the Monte Carlo method the Optimal Statistical Estimator (OSE) was used for response surface (RS) generation from the set of CFD calculations. The results of the uncertainty analysis show that OSE is a very suitable method for RS generation, which is then used in uncertainty analysis using the Monte Carlo method to determine the 5% lower limit and 95% upper limit with 95% confidence level. In this way, the impact of some sources of uncertainty is evaluated. Also, OSE can reproduce the CFD simulation with high accuracy at the CFD calculation points, even in the case when only 5 out of 40 calculation points are used for RS generation. The results further suggest that it is very important to perform accurate reference calculation and select appropriate ranges of variation for uncertain input parameters.