Bolt study - behaviour of bolts in drop accident scenarios of the Nirex 3m3 Box ILW package

The mission of Nirex is to provide the UK with safe, environmentally sound and publicly acceptable options for the long-term management of radioactive materials. One of the key tasks is to ensure that waste is packaged by waste producers in a form which is suitable for safe storage, transport, handling and potential disposal. In pursuit of this key requirement, Nirex has developed specifications to set the standard for the design and performance of waste packages, and has developed standard containers for the packaging of intermediate level (ILW) and some low level waste (LLW) - one of these is the 3m3 Box for immobilised operational and decommissioning ILW. The dimension envelope of this package is 1716 mm x 1716 mm in plan with 430 mm corner radii, 1226 mm tall. The maximum loaded weight is 12 tonnes. A generic design of this container has been developed, which is a welded structure manufactured from austenitic stainless steel (EN 10088-2 steel number 1.4404). The lid is connected to the body by 28 stainless steel bolts. An extensive study was carried out to develop a robust FE model of the bolts. The specific focus of this work was to use improved bolt modelling to optimize the design of the 3m3 Box, although this work could be applied to other bolted containers. This paper presents a summary of the findings from the study as follows: 1. Development of a FE bolt model for application in a 3m3 Box model. 2. Development and execution of a bolt testing programme which included tensile and shear tests on a total of 88 bolts, representing four grades of stainless steel materials, three thread sizes, and two geometries at three strain rates. 3. Benchmarking of the FE bolt model that can be used with confidence in simulating waste package behaviour in drop scenarios