Adjusting and validation of DART code. U3O8-Al CNEA's (National Atomic Energy Commission) mini plates adjustment under irradiation behavior, as part of the CNEA/ANL (Argonne National Laboratory) collaboration program to develop a DART optimized version

Full text: DART calculation program is a thermomechanical model developed by J. Rest and co-workers at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), US, which predicts the irradiation under behavior of dispersed fuels for research reactors. As part of the collaboration program between National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) and the ANL to elaborate a DART optimized version (which includes the elaboration of a version with parallel structure, the development of friendly input and output interfaces and the programming of a material properties database to unify the different versions of the code), the prediction of this version was compared with CNEA's mini plates irradiation experiences, which took place in the ORR reactor at Oak Ridge, USA. Results of the swelling and the microstructure for silicide mini plates were presented in the previous meeting. In this work, the comparison for U3O8-Al mini plates is shown. A reasonable agreement between the program predictions and the irradiation results in swelling as in the microstructure was found, with minor discrepancies due to the local inhomogeneity uncertainties in fabrication, as well as in the mini plates irradiation and to the simplification of some of the models used in the program