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Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Shinji Ebara, Takehiko Yokomine, Akihiko Shimizu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 4 | November 2006 | Pages 538-545
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1277
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
So as to make the most of an available irradiation test volume of the gas-cooled high-flux test module of the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility, the vessel of the test module is supposed to have a rectangular shape, into which specimens can be packed spatially efficiently. There is a large pressure difference of several atmospheric pressures between the inside and the outside of the vessel because gaseous helium flows inside the vessel to control the temperature of the specimens and a low-vacuum condition is kept outside the vessel for safety reasons. This pressure difference is assumed to cause readily the deformation of the vessel wall. Even a slight deformation should be taken seriously because the deformation of the vessel noticeably affects the coolant flow, that is, cooling performance. In this study, we performed elastoplastic finite element analysis for two rectangular vessels of the high-flux test module proposed by FZK and Kyushu University. In addition to the material nonlinearity, by taking into account the geometrical nonlinearity and thermal stress, we could obtain detailed results such as relations between the deformations and the pressure differences.