New Contact Boiling Experiments to Evaluate Calandria Tube Strain Acceptance Criteria

Abstract

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) has contracted the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) to conduct additional Contact Boiling (CB) experiments with the main objective of evaluating the acceptance criterion of CalandriaTube (CT) strain limit of 2%, proposed by the industry for fuel channel integrity assessments. The test conditions are selected using analytical tools and guidance from existing CANDU Owners Group (COG) test results, so as to lead to CT strain close to this value. The experiments will also be used to evaluate the CT quench temperature correlation proposed. This paper presents conditions selected for the first three experiments, their most important results and their preliminary analysis, with a focus on the test which produced CT strain in excess of 2%.