Evaluation of thermal qualification data base

Temperature is a significant variable in materials response models and is an important measure of fuel behavior. The present study is an in-depth analysis of a thermal data base from the IFA-429, IFA-431, IFA-432, IFA-513, and IFA-518 test programs. The consistency between the thermal resistance data from various test programs was checked with three analysis techniques: exposure regional smoothing, cell-grouped contour plotting, and linear regression. The measured thermal resistances were found to be consistent between different test programs, and a linear dependence of initial thermal resistance on initial gap size was observed. (orig.)