Analysis for steam separators in BWR

Steam seperators in BWR are thin walled pipes with special cyclons for seperating steam and water arranged in a hexagonal scheme and welded to the core cover head. The pipes are connected to each other in two planes by a gridwork of small upright sheets also arranged in a hexagonal scheme. At the level of these gridworks there are also shroud rings for holding long screws. The sheets of the gridwork run concentric to the tubes and are interrupted by the tubes. The interiour forces of the gridwork-members are transferred through the tubewalls by circumferential bending which causes extreme elastic ovalizing of the pipe corss-section near to the gridwork connection. The height of these members may be constant or broader at the pipe connection (fig. 1d) for reducing the bending stresses in the pipe walls. If this ovalizing is involved in the elastic behaviour of the gridwork it works like a plate with a Poisson ratio ν approx. equal to 1. Such structures are extremely stiff against equal stresses in perpendicular directions and extremely weak for opposite stresses in both directions. Instead of this interrupted grid work the upper one may be a continues one, arranged tangentially to the tupes. The elastic behaviour of this gridwork is quite different to that of the interrupted one. (orig./GL)