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Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has designed, printed, and successfully tested a specimen capsule for use in its High Flux Isotope Reactor.
The achievement is a first for additive manufacturing which can be used to create, customize, and qualify complex shapes more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional fabrication methods.
Specimen capsules, commonly referred to as rabbit capsules, are used in nuclear fuels and materials research to hold experiments undergoing irradiation in a test reactor.
To demonstrate that additive manufacturing could produce and qualify a rabbit capsule for use in a reactor, ORNL used a laser powder bed printer to print a stainless-steel capsule that was then assembled, loaded, and sealed.
The capsule was later inserted into HFIR for nearly a month, where it successfully weathered the effects of the reactor’s high neutron flux environment.
“This is a significant step toward demonstrating that additive manufacturing can be used to develop and qualify specialized components that cannot be conventionally machined,” said Richard Howard, group lead for irradiation engineering at ORNL.
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