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3D Printing Possibilities: Additive Manufacturing Impact Limiters for Transportation Casks
With the significant advances in additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing, Orano Federal Services and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte recently re-examined the capabilities to print impact limiters for transportation casks used to ship spent nuclear fuel. Impact limiters protect transportation casks (sometimes also referred to as transportation overpacks) and their contents during an accident. Impact limiter designs must withstand testing based on a certain significance level of hypothetical accidents, including drops, crushing, fires, and immersion in water.
Jonathan Gérardin, Pierre Ruyer, Pascal Boulet
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 1 | September 2014 | Pages 103-118
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-61
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The reflooding of the reactor core during a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) in a pressurized water reactor is a rather complex conjugate heat transfer situation. In the mist flow regime downward from the quench front, the rod wall can reach temperatures up to 1400 K, and radiative heat transfer can play a significant role. The present study concerns the accurate numerical computation of radiative heat transfer throughout a subchannel with LOCA representative flow conditions resolved at a computational fluid dynamics–scale spatial discretization thus allowing the large gradients of two-phase-flow properties to be determined. The accuracy of several methods to solve the radiative transfer equations has been compared both in canonical test cases and in low-pressure LOCA conditions. The role of radiative transfer is obvious in all variables including those related to the dynamics of the flow. Analysis of the gap between the present estimation and a standard correlation has been performed. It leads to the conclusion that radiative transfer can be taken into account accurately by correlation as soon as well-defined radiative properties are considered. The transfer is very sensitive to droplet size and concentration and can be as large as the convective heat transfer.