Development of a used fuel cladding damage model incorporating circumferential and radial hydride responses

Abstract

At the completion of the fuel drying process, used fuel Zry4 cladding typically exhibits a significant population of δ-hydride inclusions. These inclusions are in the form of small platelets that are generally oriented both circumferentially and radially within the cladding material. There is concern that radially-oriented hydride inclusions may weaken the cladding material and lead to issues during used fuel storage and transportation processes. A high fidelity model of the mechanical behavior of hydrides has utility in both designing fuel cladding to be more resistant to this hydride-induced weakening and also in suggesting modifications to drying, storage, and transport operations to reduce the impact of hydride formation and/or the avoidance of loading scenarios that could overly stress the radial inclusions.We develop a mechanical model for the Zry4-hydride system that, given a particular morphology of hydride inclusions, allows the calculation of the response of the hydrided cladding under various loading scenarios. The model treats the Zry4 matrix material as J2 elastoplastic, and treats the hydrides as platelets oriented in predefined directions (e.g., circumferentially and radially). The model is hosted by the Albany analysis framework, where a finite element approximation of the weak form of the cladding boundary value problem is solved using a preconditioned Newton–Krylov approach. Instead of forming the required system Jacobian operator directly or approximating its action with a differencing operation, Albany leverages the Trilinos Sacado package to form the Jacobian via automatic differentiation. We present results that describe the performance of the model in comparison with as-fabricated Zry4 as well as HB Robinson fuel cladding. Further, we also present performance results that demonstrate the efficacy of the overall solution method employed to host the model.