Development of honeycomb impact limiters

General Atomics (GA), has a contract with DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) to develop two legal weight truck casks to transport spent fuel. The GA-4 and GA-9 Casks transport four pressurized-water-reactor (PWR) and nine boiling-water-reactor spent fuel assemblies respectively. The GA-4 and GA-9 Casks preliminary designs include honeycomb impact limiters on the top and bottom of the cask bodies to protect them during any normal transport or hypothetical accident drop onto an unyielding surface. To evaluate the response of the cask during a drop, we need load vs deflection curves for the impact limiters at different impact angles. To obtain these curves, we made a solid model of an impact limiter with a geometry modeling computer code. We used a plane to cut through the model and obtain the footprint of the impact limiter as it crushes. As honeycomb sections are oriented in different directions in the impact limiter, we calculated the crushed areas for each individual section. Each section was then assigned a crushing force that varied from the nominal honeycomb crush strength