Mechanical behaviors of the dispersion nuclear fuel plates induced by fuel particle swelling and thermal effect II: Effects of variations of the fuel particle diameters

Simulation of irradiation hardening of Zircaloy within plate-type dispersion nuclear fuel elements

“…Actually, the in-pile temperature of the typical dispersion fuel element in this study is around 600 K [8][9][10][11][12]. The temperature within the matrix is much lower than 0.5 T m (the melting temperature T m of Zircaloy is about 2123 K [13]).…”

“…According to the previous study [9], it can be obtained that the thermal effects at the increasing stage of burnup are relatively weak in normal operation, so in this study the real thermal effects at the increasing stage of burnup are ignored. In the previous studies [10][11][12], in considering the similarity between the irradiation swelling and the thermal expansion, the irradiation swelling of the fuel particles was simulated with the method of virtual temperature increase. While the irradiation growth of the cladding, which shows elongation in one direction and shrinking in other two directions, can be modeled with the method of virtual anisotropic thermal expansion.…”

“…The thermal expansion coefficient [22] [8][9][10][11][12]. While in this work this expression should be adjusted by a factor to predict the effect of the fast neutron fluence.…”

“…Shurong Ding et al [9,10] studied the thermal and mechanical behaviors in the plate-type dispersion nuclear fuel element, but they did not consider the actual cladding structure. Qiming Wang and Shurong Ding [11,12] further studied the in-pile mechanical performances under different microstructures with allowing for the mechanical interactions between the fuel meat and the cladding; whereas, the synergistic effects of irradiation hardening of the Zircaloy with other irradiation behaviors were not yet considered.…”

“…Based on the previous works [11,12], the effects of the irradiation swelling of the fuel particle, the irradiation growth of the cladding together with the irradiation hardening effects of the matrix and the cladding are considered in a systematic way. Special methods are carried out to simulate the coupling features using finite element method.…”