Abstract
Accident tolerant fuels (ATF) has been studied since the Fukushima Daiichi accident in the research efforts to develop new materials which under accident scenarios could maintain the fuel rod integrity for a longer period compared to the cladding and fuel system usually utilized in Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR). The efforts have been focused on new materials applied as cladding, then iron-base alloys appear as a possible candidate. The aim of this paper is to implement modifications in a fuel performance code to evaluate the behavior of iron-based alloys under Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) scenario. For this, initially the properties related to the thermal and mechanical behavior of iron-based alloys were obtained from the literature, appropriately adapted and introduced in the fuel performance code subroutines. The adopted approach was step by step modifications, where different versions of the code were created. The assessment of the implemented modification was carried out simulating an experiment available in the open literature (IFA-650.5) related to zirconium-based alloy fuel rods submitted to LOCA conditions. The obtained results for the iron-based alloy were compared to those obtained using the regular version of the fuel performance code for zircaloy-4. The obtained results have shown that the most important properties to be changed are those from the subroutines related to the mechanical properties of the cladding. The results obtained have shown that the burst is observed at a longer time for fuel rods with iron-based alloy, indicating the potentiality of this material to be used as cladding with ATF purposes.
Highlights
The development of new materials to be applied in nuclear fuel rods requires an extensive research program comprising a series of experiments, computational simulation, and in-core tests
Due to the fact that this paper is focused in the modification of the FRAPTRAN code to evaluate the behavior of AISI 348 under Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) scenario, the results presented below show only the performance of the fuel rod during the accident
The recent efforts to develop Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) have shown that iron-based alloys are potential candidates to be studied to replace the zirconium-based alloys currently used as cladding
Summary
The development of new materials to be applied in nuclear fuel rods requires an extensive research program comprising a series of experiments, computational simulation, and in-core tests. The activities involving all these steps spend at least 10 years In this sense, the adaptation of recognized computational tools used to evaluate the fuel performance can help to save efforts and decrease the time to be consumed in the entire process. Nowadays it involves efforts of different sectors from the international nuclear community It includes universities, research institutes, regulatory authorities, and suppliers from all around the world. The major part of the studies being carried out in the framework of the ATF program is focused on the development and test of materials to be applied as cladding These materials shall present good stability at high temperatures, especially in steam environment, to avoid the problem related to the hydrogen generation observed with zirconium-based alloys under accident scenarios. To comply with these requirements, the main materials under investigation are iron-based-alloys, and coated zirconium-based alloys
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