Improved design of guiding device for burnable poison assembly handling tool

The guiding device, which performs open and close action reliably, safely and accurately in association with the up and down movement of BPA (Burnable Poison Assembly), is a key point for BPA handling tool design. In a conventional design, four-linkage mechanism is used. However, the pull-link is fairly long and the structure is complicated. In this paper, we propose a new design of the guiding device, where linear can and roller are used instead. A 3-D simulation study on kinematic and kinetic performance of the new guiding device shows that the design improvement is reasonable and achievable. (authors)