Design,Development, Analysis and Comparison of Instrumented Irradiation Capsule for Online Determination of Uniaxial Creep Behavior in Structural Specimen Out-of-Pile Test Results with Analytical Results in FBTR

The main intent of this work is to develop an instrumented capsule for online determination of uniaxial creep behavior of SS 316L structural specimen. The irradiation capsule has three different zones located one over the other. In the bottom zone of the capsule, the specimen is located, with one end fixed to the bottom portion of capsule and the other end connected to a central tube through a connecting plug. In the top zone a linear variable differential transducer (LVDT) is placed and its core is passed through the central tube. The end point of the LVDT core touches the plug connected to the specimen to measure the elongation of the structural specimen. In this capsule setup, bellows are used to apply a load on the structural specimen with the use of pressurized argon gas. With the application of pressure, the bottom bellow will expand and the top bellow will get compressed. During this expansion of the bottom bellow, tensile load will be applied on the specimen, and the elongation of the structural specimen will be measured by the movement of the core of the LVDT. This paper discusses the details of the design, assembly of an out-of-pile version of instrumented capsule and its experimental results are compared with literature results. The creep experiments have been carried out at three different temperatures and three different stresses (269 MPa at 450 °C, 287 MPa at 500 °C and 306 MPa at 550 °C). Initially the capsule is filled with pre-pressurized argon gas at 6 MPa at room temperature. We have observed that the force/load due to argon gas pressure is the major component for the tensile loading of the specimen and 95% of the total load acts on the SS 316L specimen and remaining 5% load only acts on the bellow. Design concept of instrumented capsule for uniaxial creep measurement has been validated.     

Interruption of hydration state of thermoresponsive polymer,poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) in guanidinium hydrochloride

In this article, we investigate the effect of guanidinium hydrochloride (GdnHCl) on the phase transition temperature of poly (N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) in aqueous solution with the aid of fluorescence spectroscopy, viscosity (η), and dynamic light scattering (DLS) measurements. Temperature dependent fluorescence intensity measurements have been employed successfully to determine the conformational change of PNIPAM through evaluating the Gibbs free energy changes. Additionally, direct hydrogen bonding formation between GdnHCl and PNIPAM has been confirmed by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy measurements at various concentrations of GdnHCl. The intermolecular interactions were also studied in terms of amide I band analysis, which reveals the interruption of hydrated coil conformation of PNIPAM. The degree of destabilization of PNIPAM progressively increases with increasing concentration of the denaturant.