Prediction of Pressure Tube Ballooning Under Non-Uniform Circumferential Temperature Gradients and High Internal Pressure

Abstract

In some accident scenarios in CANDU reactors the pressure tube is expected to reach sufficiently high temperature at high internal pressure such that the pressure tube expands radially, i.e., the pressure tube balloons. Under these conditions it is of importance to the assessment of fuel channel integrity to be able to accurately predict the timing and extent of pressure tube ballooning. If the circumferential temperature gradient on the pressure tube is non-uniform, the resulting transverse hoop stress is non-uniform and the pressure tube experiences a non-uniform ballooning. This could result in a failure of the pressure tube before it balloons into contact with the surrounding calandria tube. The fuel channel integrity code SMARTT (Simulation Method for Azimuthal and Radial Temperature Transients) is used to predict the ballooning of CANDU Zr-2.5wt%Nb pressure tubes. The pressure tube strain rate calculation in SMARTT was extracted and used as the basis for the code PTSTRAIN which was constructed to model pressure tube ballooning with the temperature of the pressure tube and the internal pressure specified as the boundary conditions for the calculation. The main objectives of this paper are to describe the comparison of the predictions of this code against two different sets of experiments which were performed with defected and non-defected pressure tubes, and to provide further validation of the pressure tube ballooning model against independent experiments.