• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2000.04a
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• pp.171-178
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• 2000

In order to evaluate the tensile behaviors of hoop direction for the nuclear fuel cladding tubes the shapes of specimen and jig fixtures for the ring test are decided with various conditions under the elastic-large plastic deformations. The axial displacement of the jig cylinders is converted to the circumferential direction elongations of specimen. The stress distributions on specimen are depended on the radii and locations of specimen and jig size and central angle. Therefore we calculated the stress distributions and decided the optimum shapes to get the uniform stress in the area of specimen gage length. Form the analysis the stress distributions in gate area are reviewed with the radii and location of specimen notch and the central angle of jig cylinder,. The optimum shapes of specimen and jig are proposed to the clad tube having 10.62 mm in diameter and 0.63mm in thickness for 16x16 PWR nuclear fuel assembly.

• Proceedings of the Korean Radioactive Waste Society Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.80-81
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• 2019

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.22-33
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• 1987

The confirmed integrity of nuclear fuel cladding materials is an important object during steady state and transient operations at nuclear power plant. In this context, the clad material yielding behavior is especially important because of pellet-clad gap expansion. During the steep power excursion, the in-pile irradiation behavior differences between uranium-dioxide fuel pellet and zircaloy clad induce the contact pressure between them. If this pressure reaches the zircaloy clad yield pressure, the zircaloy clad will be plastically deformed. After the reactor power resumed to normal state, this plastic permanent expansion of clad tube give rise to the pellet-clad gap expansion. In this paper, the simple mandrel expansion test method which utilizes thermal expansion difference between copper mandrel and zircaloy tube was adopted to simulate this phenomenon. That is, copper mandrel which has approximately three times of thermal expansion coefficient of zircaloy-4 (PWR fuel cladding material) were used in this experiment at the temperature range from 400C to 700C. The measured plastic expansion of zircaloy outer radius and derived mathematical relations give the yield pressure, yield stress of zircaloy-4 clad at the various clad wall temperatures, the activation energy of zircaloy tube yielding, and pellet-clad gap expansion. The obtained results are in good agreement with previous experimental results. The mathematical analysis and simple test method prove to be a reliable and simple technique to assess the yielding behavior and gap expansion measurement between zircaloy-4 tube and uranium-dioxide fuel pellet under biaxial stress conditions.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2007.05a
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• pp.361-365
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• 2007

우라늄을 내장한 연료봉은 핵분열이 일어나는 우라늄 펠렛(pellet)을 1차적으로 차폐하는 중요한 구조물이다. 연료봉은 원자로 내에서 유체유발진동에 의해 손상될 수 있으며, 본 연구에서는 유동유발진동 특성을 예측하기 위해 핵연료봉의 동특성 규명을 위한 모드해석을 수행하였다. 핵연료봉의 진동특성을 규명하기 위해 제작한 시험장치를 이용하여 피복관(clad tube)의 진동특성실험과 유한 요소 해석을 수행하였다. 모드시험(Modal Testing)은 현재 상용 핵연료봉(튜브)을 대상으로 수행되었으며, 유한 요소 해석 모델을 개발하여 해석 결과와 시험 결과를 비교 분석하였다.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.231-238
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• 2003

The fuel of light water reactor is used for several years under high temperature and pressure, so it needs to be clad with high corrosion resistance material. The cladding materials must have the characteristics of low absorption of a neutron and high corrosion resistance. Zircaloy-2 in Boiling Water Reactor, Zircaloy-4 in Pressurized Water Reactor have been used as cladding materials and Zirlo has been developed as the material for preventing the corrosion. If the fracture of the cladding tube occurs during operation, it will cause the economic loss to shut down and replace the system. So it is needed to evaluate the integrity of the cladding materials. In this paper, the tensile characteristics of the cladding materials were investigated for the basic research of fracture characteristics. Also the residual stress was analyzed to compare the tube type(original type) specimen and the flattened type specimen.

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.50 no.2
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• pp.122-126
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• 2013

The surface roughness of the inner and outer surfaces of a tube is an important requirement for nuclear fuel cladding. When an inner SiC clad tube, which is considered as an advanced Pressurized Water Cooled Reactor (PWR) clad with a three-layered structure, is fabricated by Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), the surface roughness of the substrate, graphite, is an important process parameter. The surface character of the graphite substrate could directly affect the roughness of the inner surface of SiC deposits, which is in contact with a substrate. To evaluate the effects of the surface roughness changes of a substrate, SiC deposits were fabricated using different types of graphite substrates prepared by the following four polishing paths and heat-treatment for purification: (1) polishing with #220 abrasive paper (PP) without heat treatment (HT), (2) polishing with #220 PP with HT, (3) #2400 PP without HT, (4) polishing with #2400 PP with HT. The average surface roughnesses (Ra) of each deposited SiC layer are 4.273, 6.599, 3.069, and $6.401{\mu}m$, respectively. In the low pressure SiC CVD process with a graphite substrate, the removal of graphite particles on the graphite surface during the purification and the temperature increasing process for CVD seemed to affect the surface roughness of SiC deposits. For the lower surface roughness of the as-deposited interlayer of SiC on the graphite substrate, the fine controlled processing with the completed removal of rough scratches and cleaning at each polishing and heat treating step was important.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.88-104
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• 1988

The FUel Rod Analysis(FURA) code is developed using two-dimensional finite element methods for axisymmetric and plane stress analysis of fuel rod. It predicts the thermal and mechanical behavior of fuel rod during normal and load follow operations. To evaluate the exact temperature distribution and the inner gas pressure, the radial deformation of pellet and clad, the fission gas release are considered over the full-length of fuel rod. The thermal element equation is derived using Galerkin's techniques. The displacement element equation is derived using the principle of virtual works. The mechanical analysis can accommodate various components of strain: elastic, plastic, creep and thermal strain as well as strain due to swelling, relocation and densification. The 4-node quadratic isoparametric elements are adopted, and the geometric model is confined to a half-pellet-height region with the assumption that pellet-pellet interaction is symmetrical. The pellet cracking and crack healing, pellet-cladding interaction are modelled. The Newton-Raphson iteration with an implicit algorithm is applied to perform the analysis of non-linear material behavior accurately and stably. The pellet and cladding model has been compared with both analytical solutions and experimental results. The observed and predicted results are in good agreement. The general behavior of fuel rod is calculated by axisymmetric system and the cladding behavior against radial crack is used by plane stress system. The sensitivity of strain aging of PWR fuel cladding tube due to load following is evaluated in terms of linear power, load cycle frequency and amplitude.