Mechanical Analysis of the Fuel Assembly Box of a HPLWR Fuel Assembly
- Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH, Institute for Nuclear and Energy Technologies, P.O. Box 3640, D-76021 Karlsruhe (Germany)
- RWE Power AG, D-45128 Essen (Germany)
The aim of the work presented in this paper is to demonstrate that the assembly box of the fuel assembly for a HPLWR proposed by Hofmeister et al. will remain mechanically within the design limits. The commercial finite element code ANSYS has been used to investigate the deformation behaviour caused by thermal convective and pressure boundary conditions provided by the results from Waata et al. for the fuel assembly. The results of these ANSYS analyses show a bending of the assembly box caused by the applied temperature and pressure distribution which, however, is still within the geometrical allowances. The maximum bending of the 4.35 m long assembly box appears close to the mid section, i.e. at 2.45 m axial height, and amounts to about 2 mm, only. The maximum indentation is mainly caused by the pressure difference across the box wall and occurs near the top of the assembly. The indentation at this point can be evaluated to be around 0.2 mm. Both bending and indentation will influence the coolant mass flux and the moderator distribution, and thus needs to be considered for predictions of the power profile and of the coolant heat-up. They are not considered to be critical as long as these deformations are small compared with the nominal gap width of 1 mm between box wall and claddings and 10 mm between adjacent assembly boxes. A second analysis has been performed to study the effect on non-symmetric coolant temperature profiles. A coolant temperature increase by 30 deg. C on one side of the box increased the thermal bending to 4 mm, indicating the sensitivity of this design with respect to temperature non-uniformities. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21021045
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2006 International congress on advances in nuclear power plants - ICAPP'06, Reno - Nevada (United States), 4-8 Jun 2006; Other Information: Country of input: France; 4 refs; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2006 international congress on advances in nuclear power plants - ICAPP'06, 2734 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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