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.