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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.
Arvind Sundaram, Yeni Li, Hany Abdel-Khalik
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1365-1381
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2027147
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The widespread digitization of critical industrial systems such as nuclear reactors has led to the development of digital twins and/or the adoption of artificial intelligence techniques for simulating baseline behavior and performing predictive maintenance. Such analytical tools, referred to as anomaly detection techniques, rely on features extracted from data that describe the underlying physical process. While these anomaly detection systems may work well with simulated data, their real-world applications are often hindered by the presence of noise. In some cases, noise may obscure subtle anomalies that may carry information about incipient stages of system faults. These subtle variations may also be the result of malicious intrusion such as so-called false data injection attack, equipment degradation causing sensor drift, or other natural disturbances in the process or the sensors. Consequently, there is a need to extract features that are robust to noise and also denoise data in a manner that aids machine-learning (ML) tools in diagnostics. In this regard, this paper presents a singular value decomposition–based statistical data–driven approach for feature extraction, denoted by randomized window decomposition, to capture the underlying physics of the system. Additionally, the features are used to denoise data to reveal subtle anomalies while also preserving relevant information for ML algorithms. The denoising algorithm is demonstrated using a RELAP5 simulation of a representative nuclear reactor with virtual noise.