Abstract
ABSTRACT FEMAXI-8 is the latest version of the fuel performance code FEMAXI, which has been developed by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) to analyze the thermal and mechanical behavior of a single fuel rod under primarily normal operation conditions and anticipated transient conditions. The development after the release of the previous version FEMAXI-7 addressed modeling on thermal and mechanical effects of fuel pellet relocation, fission gas release, fission-gas-induced swelling, etc., to provide a better description of fuel behavior observed in irradiation tests and underlying phenomena. Another key advance is the introduction of new mechanical calculation options with the intension of producing an improved treatment of various factors that affects stability of calculation, namely, time step control and nonlinear factors such as pellet cracking, contact between axial nodes, and axial friction between fuel pellets and cladding tube. Such factors were a primary source of numerical problems encountered by former versions of FEMAXI and have hindered thorough assessment of their predictive performance. A validation analysis performed against 168 irradiation test cases using a set of consistent calculation models implemented in FEMAXI-8 revealed that the new version makes reasonable predictions in terms of fuel center temperature, fission gas release, rod free volume, and cladding deformation, under steady-state and power ramp conditions.
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