• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.16 no.2 s.107
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• pp.163-168
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• 2006

The PWR Nuclear Fuel assembly consists of more than 250 fuel rods that are supported by leaf springs in the cells of more than 10 Spacer Grids (SG) along the rod length. Since it is not easy to conduct mechanical tests on a full-scale model basis, the small-scaled rod bundle $(5\times5)$ which is called partial fuel assembly is generally used for various performance tests during the development stage. As one of the small-scaled tests, a flow test should be carried out in order to verify the performance of the spacer grid to obtain the Flow-Induced Vibration (FIV) characteristics of the scaled fuel assembly over the specified flow range. A vibration test should be also performed to obtain the modal parameters of the assembly prior to the flow test. In this study, we want to develop the estimation procedure of the damping ratio for the scaled test assembly. For the damping factor of the partial fuel assembly and the grid cage at the first vibration mode, as one of the vibration tests, a so-called pluck testing has been performed in air as a preliminary test prior to in-flow damping measurement test. Logarithmic decrement method is used for calculation of the damping ratio. Estimated damping ratio of the partial fuel assembly is about $0.7\%$ with reasonable error of $2\%$ for the previous results. Nonlinear behavior of the partial fuel assembly might be stem mainly from the rod-grid support configuration.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.246-249
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• 2006

Finite element vibration analysis of the trial 5x5 partial fuel assembly in the still water was performed using the substructure method. ANSYS software was used as a finite element modeling and modal analysis tool. The calculated natural frequencies of the partial fuel assembly were more consistent with the experimental results for the identical test model compared to the much larger solid model. This modeling technique can be utilized for the fuel assembly dynamic behavior analysis under normal operation, seismic and loss-of-coolant-accident analysis.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.10
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• pp.3943-3948
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• 2022

Single-photon emission computed tomography is one of the reliable pin-by-pin verification techniques for spent-fuel assemblies. One of the challenges with this technique is to increase the total fuel assembly verification speed while maintaining high verification accuracy. The aim of the present study, therefore, was to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm-based tomographic image analysis technique for partial-defect verification of fuel assemblies. With the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation technique, a tomographic image dataset consisting of 511 fuel-rod patterns of a 3 × 3 fuel assembly was generated, and with these images, the VGG16, GoogLeNet, and ResNet models were trained. According to an evaluation of these models for different training dataset sizes, the ResNet model showed 100% pattern estimation accuracy. And, based on the different tomographic image qualities, all of the models showed almost 100% pattern estimation accuracy, even for low-quality images with unrecognizable fuel patterns. This study verified that an AI model can be effectively employed for accurate and fast partial-defect verification of fuel assemblies.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.211.1-211
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• 2002

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.299-299
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• 2002

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.839-840
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• 2004

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.300.1-300.1
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• 2004

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.459-460
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• 2005

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.193-204
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• 1989

This paper develops a new method for reconstructing neutron flux distribution, that is based on the maximum entropy Principle in information theory. The Probability distribution that maximizes the entropy Provides the most unbiased objective Probability distribution within the known partial information. The partial information are the assembly volume-averaged neutron flux, the surface-averaged neutron fluxes and the surface-averaged neutron currents, that are the results of the nodal calculation. The flux distribution on the boundary of a fuel assembly, which is the boundary condition for the neutron diffusion equation, is transformed into the probability distribution in the entropy expression. The most objective boundary flux distribution is deduced using the results of the nodal calculation by the maximum entropy method. This boundary flux distribution is then used as the boundary condition in a procedure of the imbedded heterogeneous assembly calculation to provide detailed flux distribution. The results of the new method applied to several PWR benchmark problem assemblies show that the reconstruction errors are comparable with those of the form function methods in inner region of the assembly while they are relatively large near the boundary of the assembly. The incorporation of the surface-averaged neutron currents in the constraint information (that is not done in the present study) should provide better results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.93-101
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• 2001

The spacer grid is one of the main structural components in the fuel assembly, which supports the fuel rods, guides cooling water, and protects the system from an external impact load, such as earthquakes. Therefore, the mechanical and structural properties of the spacer grids must be extensively examined while designing them. In this paper, a numerical method for predicting the buckling strength of spacer grids is presented. Numerical analyses on the buckling behavior of the spacer grids are performed for a various array of sizes of the grids considering that the spacer grid is an assembled structure with thin-walled plates and imposing proper boundary conditions by nonlinear dynamic finite element method using ABAQUS/Explicit. Buckling tests on several numbers of specimens of the spacer grid were also carried out in order to compare the results between the test and the simulation result. The drop test is accomplished by dropping a carriage on the specimen at a pre-determined position. From this test, the specimens are buckled only at the uppermost and the lowermost layer among the multi-cells, which is similar to the local buckling at the weakest point of the grid structure. The simulated results also similarly predicted the local buckling phenomena and were found to give good correspondence with the experimental values for the thin-walled grid structures.