LABORATOIRES AND FACILITIES

An important action of VELLA consists of grouping the numerous small laboratories spread across the Europe into virtual structures in parallel to the large devices considered reference laboratories themselves. The first group of distributed infrastructures is constituted by two “virtual” laboratories, called:

• “MATLAB” (MATerial LABoratory)
• “CHEMLAB” (CHEMistry LABoratory)

MATLAB is a virtual laboratory initiated to meet the willing of different laboratories spread through the EU to act as a unique structure, in order to offer the opportunity to a large amount of researchers coming from every part of the Community to perform their test campaigns.
Within this virtual lab it is possible to perform compatibility tests among different structural materials and heavy liquid metals such as Lead and Lead-bismuth.
The possible tests include tensile, fatigue, fracture toughness, creep and corrosion investigations on irradiated and unirradiated materials. The corrosion science laboratory, comprises both facilities for flowing liquid metal and facilities for stagnant tests.
Parts of MATLAB, in fact, are LECOR & CHOEPE III (ENEA, Italy), COLONRI I&II (NRI, Czech Republic), LINCE (CIEMAT, Spain), CORRIDA (FZK, Germany) and CICLAD (CEA, France) for corrosion tests of unirradiated materials in flowing Lead and Lead-Bismuth. Also LIMETS I&II (SCK.CEN, Belgium), COSTA 1-6 (FZK, Germany) and COLIMESTRA (CEA, France) belong to MATLAB. They are stagnant devices for irradiated materials (the first one) and for unirradiated materials (the last two devices).

CHEMLAB is virtual laboratory on lead physic and chemistry science which is devoted to the chemistry control related studies of Lead-Bismuth eutectic systems, such as the oxygen control and monitoring, as well as the other impurities control in both the liquid and the gas phases.
It comprises ELEFANT (FZD, Germany), STELLA (CEA, France), OCEAN & THESYS (FZK, Germany) and CHEOPE II (ENEA, Italy).
The large facilities create the three real labs named as the devices themselves:

• “CIRCE“
• “TALL”
• “KALLA-THEADES

CIRCE is a large scale pool type facility for the study of thermal – hydraulic issues. TALL was originally designed to investigate the thermal-hydraulic phenomena for normal and transient conditions of the accelerator driven system. KALLA-THEADES is an important facility having relevant dimension for thermal-hydraulic studies and component tests.
This VELLA infrastructure concept makes these five laboratories easily accessible by researchers and, among them, the two distributed laboratories are enough flexible to give integrated answer to relatively complex questions (i.e. characterisation of materials, qualification of instruments and technologies).
Object to the success of VELLA, these facilities could be really seen as an unique Research Infrastructure ready to support the EU effort in this field. Also, the concept itself of an exchange of people, knowledge and know how is actually part of a free European community attitude, inside which the information sharing and people mobility play a fundamental role.