Impacting wear behavior of spring-supported tubes in high temperature distilled water

Fretting-related degradations due to FIV have been concentrated on the major components of nuclear power plants such as the fuel rods, steam generator tubes and control rods. Especially, in the case of the nuclear fuel rod, the wear mode could be changed from a sliding wear (existence of a contact force) to an impact/sliding wear (existence of a gap) because the spacer grid materials degraded due to the neutron irradiation effect and the high temperature environment. To improve the reliability of the nuclear fuel, the impacting wear behavior should be examined in actual operating conditions even though it is difficult to define the exact contact condition between the fuel rod and the spacer grid spring. Also, there has been little effort made to examine the impacting wear behavior of the nuclear fuel rod. The objective of this study is to examine the impacting wear behavior of the nuclear fuel rod against the spacer grid spring in high temperature distilled water