THERMAL PREDICTIONS OF THE AGR-2 EXPERIMENT WITH VARIABLE GAS GAPS

摘要

A new daily as-run thermal analysis was performed at the Idaho National Laboratory for the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR-2) test experiment number two in the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). This thermal analysis incorporates gas gaps changing with time during the irradiation experiment due to graphite shrinkage due to neutron damage. The purpose of this analysis was to calculate the daily average temperatures of each TRISO-particle fuel. A steady-state thermal analysis was performed for each daily calculation with the commercial finite element heat transfer code ABAQUS. These new thermal predictions show the compact fuel temperature dependence on the variable gas gap method. Comparison between measured and calculated temperatures is discussed.