Preliminary study on load and stress characteristic evaluation for handing reinforcement device of spent nuclear fuel

The developing device will be installed in Guide Tube (GT) of SNF, and various working mechanisms of the device have been considering. In this study, the load and stress characteristics are evaluated for the device with the friction coupling working mechanism. For the evaluation, a Finite Element (FE) model has been developed and FE analyses are performed. Also, the correlations for FE analysis results are evaluated using regression analysis. The FE model is generated based on the Westinghouse 17×17 type Fuel Assembly (FA), which is the heaviest among the FAs with the IGSCC concern. The FE analyses are performed to evaluate load and stress characteristics for reinforcement device. To obtain high performance of the device, coupling stress is larger than yield stress. In the future, coupling load will be optimized to increase handling load using stress limit constraints