Structural Analysis of Nuclear Fuel Element with Ansys Software

Abstract

Prediction of thermo-mechanical behavior of fuel element in a nuclear power plant is very much necessary to design and prevent the failure of element in operating conditions. In this work an attempt is made to find out the structural analysis of a fuel element in operating condition of a nuclear power plant. For structural analysis, first thermal analysis is carried out to find out the non-uniform temperature in fuel element, which is then used as a thermal load in structural analysis. The stress, strain and displacement of the fuel element are found out for different thickness of gap in between pellet and claddings. Then analysis is also carried out for different values of heat transfer co-efficient. From structural analysis it is found that though it is expanding due to thermal effects, it is within limit. A nuclear fuel rod of boiling water reactor is considered. Standard thermo-physical data are considered for study purposes. Separate governing equations are considered for pellet and cladding. Heat generation is considered only in the pellet. Since the height of the pellet is much larger than the diameter of rod axial distribution of temperature is neglected. That means heat transfer equations comes to one-dimensional form. The Finite Element Method (FEM) is used in ANSYS to descretize the computational domain. A coupled analysis is carried out to find out the temperature, heat flux, stress strain and thermal expansion.

Computer modeling of electrochemical processing of waste nuclear fuel

“…Using ANSYS, several aspects of UO 2 handling have been investigated. Among them were the following: thermal and mechanical properties of a fuel element of a thermal neutron reactor 14 ; joint analysis of temperature distributions, oxygen diffusion, and deformation to predict the exact behavior of a nuclear fuel tablet (UO 2 ) during cracking 15 ; accident analysis of heat sink loss in a spent fuel tank 16 ; simulation of the thermal behavior of shipping containers, in particular, a container for SNF assembly 17…”