Shock structural behavior of a reactor vessel

This research is one of the research and development carried out to verify the safety tolerance of nuclear reactor plants, and has been called shock-withstanding test so far. It aims at examining the shock behavior of structures such as reactor vessels at the time of core damage accident, which seems to be hard to occur technologically. In this paper, the scale-down model test and the analysis of the experiment using the PISCES-2DELK code carried out by the authors are reported. As the main conclusion obtained, the quantitative correlation among the released energy, the kinetic energy of fluid and the absorbed energy and maximum deformation of a structural material in a vessel was able to be grasped by the simulated shock pressure test using explosives. Also it was found that the PISCES-2DELK code was able to well reproduce the results of simulation test. The calibration of a pressure source, the characteristics of materials at the time of fast deformation, the mechanism of forming the deformation profile of a vessel, the methods of test and analysis, and the results obtained are reported. (Kako, I.)