TRANSNATIONAL ACCESS ACTIVITIES

The Transnational Access (TA) are activities planned to be carried out in the frame of the VELLA project, which main objective are to promote the access of researchers, universities and firms to the existing infrastructures and knowledge, in order to increase the competitiveness of the European industry, to train the researchers in using the EU infrastructures during the three years duration of the project and to help the human mobility between and towards the laboratories.
Nowadays in Europe there are large facilities and several small loops that are constituting an important technological platform in the field of material studies and liquid metal chemistry. An important action of VELLA is grouping those small loops in an homogenous distributed laboratory which would complement the European capabilities offered by the large facilities. All these facilities can give access to researchers and users (namely SME) creating the unique opportunity of the accessibility to a large European common laboratory.
The main outputs of the TA are:

• Access to the infrastructures, granted to the users interested in technological development and/or basic research;
• Human Mobility, to support the researchers inside and outside the VELLA Consortium.

The scientists’ mobility and the access to infrastructures is managed by the SAP (Scientific Access Panel).
For both the access to the infrastructures (Transnational Access) and the Human Mobility, every year will published on the VELLA website a CALL FOR PROPOSALS, soliciting applications from interested candidates.
The creation of such an infrastructure achieves two main goals. The first one is the formation of a large European scientific community, inside which people can move, exchanging knowledge and experience, and work, in synergy, towards common projects and objectives.
The second one is more related with the scientific and technological output of the created infrastructure that, exploiting the knowledge exchange, will give to the EU institutions/enterprises the possibility of taking benefits from the relevant patrimony of infrastructure created during the past years.
The introduction of this opportunity inside the HLM research community can really result into a strong contribution towards the realization of the next generation of machines, for transmutation and for Generation IV reactors, helping EU in maintaining a role of front runner in this context.
The possibility of an exchange of people, knowledge and know-how is actually part of a free European community attitude, inside which the information sharing and the people mobility play a fundamental role.

Access to the Infrastructures
As mentioned above, 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