Cold crucible technology - melting ceramics by induction heating

Abstract

As a result of collaboration with various organisations, we have developed over the last few years, cold crucible technology that would allow us to melt ceramics. We had a need to prove the capability of the process and the durability of ceramic wasteforms it produced for immobilising nuclear waste. Typically in the laboratory, melting operations were carried out in expensive platinum crucibles heated in conventional resistance furnaces. The process times were long and laborious. The need for an induction melting process at the laboratory scale was soon apparent. The results by conventional melting were excellent as was the durability of the product, however, cold crucible vitrification was the path chosen by our many organisations to process the large amounts of nuclear waste. The development of a laboratory scale cold crucible able to melt ceramics, glasses and glass-ceramics was needed so that we could validate the wasteform formulations in induction melting, here we present some results from our experiments to melt various materials using cold crucibles.