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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
Shinji Ebara, Yasutaka Harai, Takehiko Yokomine, Akihiko Shimizu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 56 | Number 1 | July 2009 | Pages 148-152
Tritium, Safety, and Environment | Eighteenth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (Part 1) | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A8892
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In solid breeder blanket design of fusion power plants, the ceramic breeder pebble bed plays a very important role. Its mechanical and thermal properties are necessary to design the blanket. In this study, thermomechancal properties of the bed such as effective thermal conductivity and stress-strain relation are investigated by means of numerical simulation. A discrete element manner is adopted in the simulation in order to clarify the influence of the individual particle properties upon the bulk behavior. As a result, the thermo-mechanical properties of pebble bed were well re-created in a computational space by means of the numerical model used in this study.