3D COMSOL Simulations for Thermal Deflection of HFIR Fuel Plate in the "Cheverton-Kelley" Experiments

Involute Working Group – Development and Validation of the Finite Element Models of the Cheverton-Kelley Experiments

“…The Poisson's ratio relates the strains in directions perpendicular to the direction of loading. The default value in STAR-CCM+ is 0.33, which is also often found in literature [17]. The parameter value was varied from 0.3 to 0.36 and the obtained change in maximum displacements is again close to linear, with ±9.1% change in the Poisson's ratio causing an average ±2.3% variation in the deflections, as shown in Table 6.2.…”

“…A sensitivity analysis of the computational results to the variation of selected input parameters is also performed. For a few of the validation cases, computational results obtained with other equivalent software are available [17] and therefore the validation can be carried out based on a cross-evaluation. The various uncertainties resulting from the validation of separate effects and integral are also evaluated.…”

“…The material properties of the metals used in the experiments were not given explicitly in the report [5]. Therefore, the modeling of the material was based on data found in literature [17], [19], [20]. To account for the lack of experimental material property data, a sensitivity analysis was performed.…”

“…Jain et al in their report [17] compared several material characteristics of the aforementioned metals at room temperature. The collected data is presented in Table 6.1.…”

“…Different colors of the plate and the base were chosen to distinguish these two parts of the model. It is worth mentioning, that the geometry of the base was not described thoroughly in [5] and that the geometry was recreated from one available standard drawing found in [17] and the photographs of the assembly. A scan of the drawing is presented in Figure 6.4.…”