Study Of Bushehr VVER-1000 Hot Fuel Rod Mechanical Performance With Rigid Pellet Method

Safe operation and maximum burning of fuel material are two issues that are recently considered in nuclear fuel rod fabrication industry. Any failure in nuclear fuel and cladding, such as fuel rod ballooning or pellet-clad high contact pressure, may cause release of radioactive fission fragments to the reactor coolant, which is an undesirable issue from the reactor safety point of view. To have a correct prediction of fuel rod performance used simulator codes, In this paper the simulation of mechanical part of Bushehr VVER-1000 fuel rods operation done with the rigid pellet and thin cylindrical model.
Empirical relationships and numerical algorithms to solve equations somehow have been selected to mechanical parameters such as the fuel rod’s outer radius and stress-strain of clad are carefully prediction. Mechanical performance Simulations Results of VVER-1000 fuel rod in good agreement with FRAPCON-3.3 output. The models used in this paper can be used to evaluate the performance of future native reactor fuel rods.