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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.
Md Motiur Rahman, Tahmina Tasnim Nahar, Dookie Kim, Dae-Wook Park
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1453-1470
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2033597
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dynamic responses of three storied auxiliary building of a nuclear power plant (NPP) constructed with a monolithic reinforced concrete shear wall are investigated in this study. The dynamic characterization is weighed through a shake table test and evaluated the efficiency of various structural modeling systems for evaluating seismic responses. The shear wall was subjected to a collaborative research round-robin analysis conducted by the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute to forecast seismic responses of the auxiliary building in the NPP using a shake table test. The shake table test was performed with five different levels of intensity measures of the base excitation to obtain acceleration responses from different positions of the building in one horizontal direction (front-back). The main motivation of this study is to develop a nonlinear numerical model and examine the efficiency of various modeling approaches for evaluating the performance under seismic loading. Three numerical modeling approaches, i.e., multi-layer shell element modeling (MLSM), fiber beam-column element modeling (FBCM), and beam-truss element modeling (BTM), are generated to simulate the seismic response behaviors of the auxiliary building structure. Modal analysis, floor response spectra, acceleration amplification factor along with height, and story shear force of the building are compared as they are critical responses for evaluating the seismic vulnerability of the structure. The comparison shows that all the nonlinear numerical modeling approaches, i.e., MLSM, FBCM, and BTM, can predict the complex behavior of a shear wall system for low earthquake level, but for high earthquake level, MLSM shows better agreement with the shake table experiment. So, it is recommended to use MLSM modeling for nonlinear analysis with an earthquake intensity measure of 1 g or more.