Experimental investigation on flow-induced vibration of fuel rods in supercritical water loop

Abstract

The supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) is one of the most promising Generation IV reactors. In order to make the fuel qualification test for SCWR, a research plan is proposed to test a small scale fuel assembly in a supercritical water loop. To ensure the structure safety of fuel assembly in the loop, a flow-induced vibration experiment was carried out to investigate the vibration behavior of fuel rods, especially the vibration caused by leakage flow. From the experiment result, it can be found that: the vibration of rods is mainly caused by turbulence when flow rate is low. However, the effects of leakage flow become obvious as flow rate increases, which could changes the distribution of vibrational energy in spectrum, increasing the vibrational energy in high-frequency band. That is detrimental to the structure safety of fuel rods. Therefore, it is more reasonable to improve the design by using the spacers with blind hole, which can eliminate the leakage flow, to assemble the fuel rods in supercritical water loop. On the other hand, the experimental result could provide a benchmark for the theoretical studies to validate the applicability of boundary condition set for the leakage-flow-induced vibration. © 2014 Licun Wu et al.