Reduction in size of bottom-mounted reactivity control mechanism of research reactor for seismic qualification test

A new research reactor employing bottom-mounted reactivity control mechanism (RCM) is under development and its safety function which is a shutdown of the reactor under earthquake events should be verified through a test. However, the real system is too heavy to be excited artificially, and hence the size of a test rig should be reduced somehow. As a preliminary study for development of a seismic test rig, this paper presents how to reduce the length of an extension shaft which is a main component of RCM while it maintains dynamic characteristics of the real system. In this paper, instead of reduction in length of the shaft, the inner/outer radius of the shaft and water gap size between the shaft and its guide tube will be modified in order to match its natural frequency and displacement due to seismic excitation to those of the real system. Furthermore, a proper mass which does not increase the stiffness will be inserted into the hollow shaft. Then, dynamic equation was derived for the beam model and an optimization problem was defined and solved. The result shows that the design modification is reasonable for description of dynamic characteristics of the real system under earthquake events