The Fractalline Properties of Experimentally Simulated PWR Fuel Crud
Name
Edited pdf.pdf
Size
4.01 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3bd3bb4f8fa3b0c597e664807bc032c4
Author(s)
Dumnernchanvanit, Ittinop
Mishra, Vikash K.
Zhang, N.Q.
Robertson, Sean Gunn
Delmore, Alexandra R.
Mota, G.
Hussey, D.
Wang, G.
Byers, W.A.
Short, Michael P
Alternative Title
The fractalline properties of experimentally simulated PWR fuel crud
Date Issued
November 2017
Journal
Journal of Nuclear Materials
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Dumnernchanvanit, Ittinop et al. "The fractalline properties of experimentally simulated PWR fuel crud." Journal of Nuclear Materials, 499 (February 2018): 294-300.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The buildup of fouling deposits on nuclear fuel rods, known as crud, continues to challenge the worldwide fleet of light water reactors (LWRs). Crud may cause serious operational problems for LWRs, including axial power shifts, accelerated fuel clad corrosion, increased primary circuit radiation dose rates, and in some instances has led directly to fuel failure. Numerous studies continue to attempt to model and predict the effects of crud, but each makes critical assumptions regarding how to treat the complex, porous microstructure of crud and its resultant effects on temperature, pressure, and crud chemistry. In this study, we demonstrate that crud is indeed a fractalline porous medium using flowing loop experiments, validating the most recent models of its effects on LWR fuel cladding. This crud is shown to match that in other LWR-prototypical facilities through a porosity-fractal dimension scaling law. Implications of this result range from post-mortem analysis of the effects of crud on reactor fuel performance, to utilizing crud's fractalline dimensions to quantify the effectiveness of anti-fouling measures.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnucmat.2017.11.041
