FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF AN EMPTY 37-ELEMENT CANDU<sup>®</sup> FUEL BUNDLE TO STUDY THE EFFECTS OF PRESSURE TUBE CREEP
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CANDU fuel bundles experience plastic deformations over time, and the horizontal configuration of the bundle in a crept pressure tube (PT) causes coolant to bypass the sagged lower half of the bundle. Bundle segments where the flow is limited may become more susceptible to dryout due to reactor aging. A finite element model of a 37-element fuel bundle was constructed using the commercial finite element software ANSYS to study the mechanical deformation behaviour of the bundle to maintain a coolable geometry. The main focus was on the contact between the fuel elements and between the fuel elements and PT. The complexity of the model due to all the contact pairs necessitated the use of high-powered computing hardware. Contact was demonstrated between the appendages, and sensitivity of the deformation to different boundary conditions (BC) was investigated. In particular, the radial position where the elements were welded to the endplate significantly impacted the magnitude of the element bowing. Expanding the PT up to 8% diametral creep demonstrated the proper functioning of the spacer pads (SP) and bearing pads in preventing sheath-to-sheath contact at the midplane and sheath-to-PT contact. However, the quarter plane was deemed to be the critical region due to the lack of SPs preventing excessive element bowing. This work has successfully illustrated the deformation of a CANDU fuel bundle, with contact, and its similarity with the bow profiles when compared with post-irradiation examination results and bundle heat-up tests.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".