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Joint Research Centre

Laboratory for materials ageing in light water reactor environments

The AMALIA laboratory carries out research in the area of corrosion and environmentally assisted cracking of reactor materials in water environments.  

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  • AMALIA
AMALIA: Autoclave with waterloop

Overview

The Laboratory for materials ageing in light water reactor (LWR) environments (AMALIA) is located at the Joint Research Centre in Petten, The Netherlands. AMALIA allows for corrosion and environmentally-assisted cracking (EAC) testing of metallic materials and alloys in typical water environments of currently operating water-cooled reactors (boiling water reactor [BWR], pressurised water reactor [PWR]) and advanced water-cooled reactors (supercritical water). 

Equipment

AMALIA encompasses 4 recirculating water loops with 6 autoclave systems, all featuring full water chemistry control. The autoclaves are equipped with various mechanical testing facilities, electro-mechanical or bellow-based pneumatic (developed by the JRC in collaboration with VTT, the Technical Research Centre of Finland), allowing for a wide range of different mechanical tests like

  • slow strain-rate tensile (SSRT) test
  • crack initiation and crack growth rate test
  • fracture mechanical test, cone-mandrel test
  • small-punch test (SPT)

The autoclaves are equipped with various instrumentation devices / techniques to monitor corrosion and crack initiation and growth among the tested specimens, covering electrochemistry, electric impedance, direct current (DC) potential drop and acoustic emission.

Two of the 6 autoclaves allow testing in supercritical water environments up to Tmax = 650°C, pmax = 25MPa and one among the 6 autoclaves allows EAC testing in PWR water of three specimens simultaneously.  AMALIA is a state-of-the-art facility serving the execution of institutional projects, Euratom projects and third-party work and contributes to European and international experimental round robin exercises within Generation IV International Forum (GIF), International Cooperative Group on Environmentally-Assisted Cracking (ICG-EAC) and European Cooperative Group on Corrosion Monitoring (ECG-COMON).   

The AMALIA Labs are also part of JRC’s Open Access to research infrastructure scheme.