Assessment of ANSYS LS-DYNA capabilities for analysis of drop tests of nuclear fuel element transportation casks

• Autor(a) principal: CARVALHO, DANIEL S.M. de
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: MATTAR NETO, MIGUEL, INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR ATLANTIC CONFERENCE
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IPEN
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ipen.br/handle/123456789/30731
• topic: benchmarks; boundary conditions; casks; computerized simulation; damping; finite element method; flexibility; fuel assemblies; fuel elements; mathematical models; nuclear fuels; recommendations; testing; transport

During the transportation of fuel elements, the cask has to provide shielding to protect workers, the public and the environment against the effects of radiation, to prevent an unwanted chain reaction, damage caused by heat and also to provide protection against dispersion of the contents. In order to standardize the design of fuel assembly transportation devices by numerical analysis, a set of dynamic analyzes was conducted to converge in a representative way the phenomena found in the drop tests used in the project qualification. Thus, this paper aims to present and discuss updated recommendations for contacts, material models and general configurations in three benchmarks. These benchmarks represent the phenomena found in numerical simulations of drop trials. Moreover, they are important to obtain an adequate correlation with the lowest possible use of computational resources. From the simulations, it was possible to observe the influence of an analysis carried out in plane strain and another one performed with the complete geometry modeled in scale 1:4 in relation to the computational cost and the precision of the results. A methodology was proposed to calibrate the stiffness and the damping control of the contacts and, mainly, their influence on the behavior of the structure.