• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.19 no.1 s.71
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• pp.93-103
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• 2006

It is absolutely essential that safety assessment of the containment buildings during service life because containment buildings are last barrier to protect radioactive substance due to the accidents. Therefore, this study describes an enhanced degenerated shell finite element(FE) which has been developed for nonlinear FE analysis of reinforced concrete(RC) containment buildings with elasto-plastic material model. For the purpose of the material nonlinear analysis, Drucker-Prager failure criteria is adapted in compression region and material parameters which determine the shape of the failure envelop are derived from biaxial stress tests. Reissner-Mindlin(RM) assumptions are adopted to develop the degenerated shell FE so that transverse shear deformation effects is considered. However, it is found that there are serious defects such as locking phenomena in RM degenerated shell FE since the stiffness matrix has been overestimated in some situations. Therefore, shell formulation is provided in this paper with emphasis on the terms related to the stiffness matrix based on assumed strain method. Finally, the performance of the present shell element to analysis RC containment buildings is tested and demonstrated with several numerical examples. From the numerical tests, the present results show a good agreement with experimental data or other numerical results.

• Applied Chemistry for Engineering
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.347-351
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• 2020

A material changes its physical and chemical properties through the interaction with radiation and also the neutrons, which is electronically neutral so that the penetration depth is relatively deeper than that of other radioactive way including alpha or beta ray. Therefore, the radiation damage by neutron irradiation has been intensively investigated for a long time with respect to the safety of nuclear power plants. The damage induced by neutron irradiation begins with the creation of point defects in atomic scale in the unit of picoseconds, and their progress pattern can be characterized by microstructural defects, such as dislocation loops and voids. Their morphological characteristics affect the properties of neutron-irradiated materials, therefore, it is very important to predict the microstructure at a given neutron irradiation condition. This paper briefly reviews the evolution of radiation damage induced by neutron irradiation and introduces a phase-field model that can be widely used in predicting the microstructure evolution of irradiated materials.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.249-257
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• 2015

A fuel assembly consists of fuel rods composed of pellets (UO2) and a cladding tube (Zircaloy). The role of the fuel rods in the reactor is to generate heat by nuclear fission, as well as to retain fission products during operation. A simulation method using a computer program was used to evaluate the safety of the nuclear fuel rods. This computer program has been called the fuel performance code. In the analysis of a light water reactor fuel rod, the gap conductance, which depended on the distance between the pellets and cladding tube, mainly influenced the thermomechanical behavior of the fuel rod. In this work, a 3D gap element was proposed to simulate the thermo-mechanical behavior of the nuclear fuel rod, considering the gap conductance. To implement the proposed 3D gap element, a 3D thermo-mechanical module was also developed using FORTRAN90. The asymmetric characteristics of the nuclear fuel rod, such as the MPS (missing pellet surface) and eccentricity, were simulated to evaluate the proposed 3D gap element.