Thermo-Mechanical Analysis for Metallic Fuel Pin under Transient Condition

Computational models for analyzing the in-reactor behavior of metallic fuel pins under transient conditions in liquid-metal reactors are developed and implemented in the TRAMAC (TRAnsient thermo-Mechanical Analysis Code) for a metal fuel rod under transient operation conditions. Not only the basic models for a fuel rod performance but also some sub-models used for transient condition are installed in TRAMAC. Among the models, a fission gas release model, which takes the multi-bubble size distribution into account to characterize the lenticular bubble shape and the saturation condition on the grain boundary and the cladding deformation model have been developed based mainly on the existing models in the MAC-SIS code. Finally, cladding strains are calculated from the amount of thermal creep, irradiation creep, and irradiation swelling. The cladding strain model in TRAMAC predicts well the absolute magnitudes and gen-eral trends of their predictions compared with those of experimental data. TRAMAC results for the FH-1,2,6 pins are more conservative than experimental data and relatively reasonable than those of FPIN2 code. From the calculation results of TRAMAC, it is apparent that the code is capable of predicting fission gas release, and cladding deformation for LMR metal fuel finder transient operation conditions. The results show that in general, the predictions of TRAMAC agree well with the available irradiation data.