Download NNUF capability proposals

NNUF capability proposals
1. Sample preparation equipment to
support the NNL NNUF facilities - £300k
• NNL's existing irradiated material preparation facilities require
significant augmentation to provide the volume and quality of
samples that are required by the instruments already purchased
with NNUF funding.
• Funding is sought for the following:
Additional fume hood space,
Ion beam thinning equipment (TEM samples),
Electropolishing chiller,
Data analysis workstation,
SEM sample cleaner,
Ion beam cross-section polisher (SEM samples)
Vacuum furnace
Cut-off saw
• The above equipment will be essential for users of the NNUF
facilities at Central Lab in order to produce high quality samples for
use on the microscopes and other equipment.
Active SEM capability for NNL
NNUF
• A new low-vacuum analytical SEM would provide the required SEM
capacity and range of analytical techniques for the examination of
irradiated fuel and materials. SEM examination is a frequent
requirement alongside X-ray tomography and TEM and NNL’s
current active SEM is very heavily used for commercial contracts.
The instrument would use an existing EBSD system already
acquired with NNUF funding which will not be usable once the FIB
on which it is currently installed goes active.
High specification EDX capabilities (to match those acquired as part
of the NCFE portfolio) would be required along with the ability to
mount other systems such as cathodoluminescence.
• The building work already underway to house NNL's NNUF facilities
includes a room for an analytical SEM.
Manpower for NNL NNUF
operations
• Though some aspects of the operating costs are covered by
existing service contracts, additional staffing will be required to
maintain, operate and manage the additional equipment and the
increased number of users created by the NNUF. This requires some
level of support in order to make the business case for recruitment
of new NNL staff.
• The instruments require regular care and maintenance at the level
of about ~120 man days per year
• Management of the user facility interactions with users also needs
to be funded. The requirement here will be affected by the
operating model chosen for NNUF access.
A national irradiated materials archive
and irradiated materials testing facility
• An archive or library of materials is a key enabler for research
programmes using irradiated samples.
• In many cases it is impractical to physically move the material and
a register of available material would suffice. In other cases,
though, a dedicated shielded storage facility having facilities for
cutting and receiving/dispatching sub-sections is required. This
facility will play a key role between the receipt and dispatch
facilities at NNL's Central and Windscale laboratories and other UK
and international sources of material on the supply side and the
CCFE MRF and university facilities as user facilities which have
much lower limits on the quantities of radioactive material that
they can store.
• The receipt/dispatch and cutting facilities could be shared with a
shielded mechanical testing facility within the same building. Such
a facility would be able to provide mechanical properties data from
samples up to and including the Charpy, tensile and fracture
toughness samples in industry-standard surveillance testing
programmes.