• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.211-222
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• 2011

In this paper a structural analysis of the PWR(pressurized water reactor) canister with 102cm diameter is carried out to evaluate the structural safety of the canister for the impact force occurring at the moment of collision with the ground in the falling plumb down accident from the carriage vehicle which may happen during the canister handling at the spent nuclear fuel disposal repository. For this, a rigid body dynamic analysis of the canister is executed to compute the impact force using the commercial CAE system, RecurDyn, and a nonlinear structural analysis is performed to compute stresses and deformations occurring inside the canister for this computed impact force using the commercial FEM code, NISA. From these analysis results, the structural safety of the canister is evaluated for the falling plumb down accident from the carriage vehicle due to the inattention during the canister handling at the repository. The rigid body dynamic analysis performed assuming the canister as a rigid body shows that the canister falls plumb down to the ground in two types. And also it shows that early collision impact force is the biggest one and following impact forces decrease gradually. The height of the carriage vehicle in the repository is assumed as 5m in order to obtain the stable structural safety evaluation result. The nonlinear structural analysis of the canister is executed for the biggest early impact force. The structural analysis result of the canister shows that the structural safety of the PWR canister is not secured for the falling plumb down accident from the moving carriage vehicle because the maximum stresses occurring in the cast iron insert of canister are bigger than the yield stress of the cast iron.