TRAN B-2: The Effect of Low Steel Content on Fuel Penetration in a Non-Melting Cylindrical Flow Channel.

摘要

The TRAN B-Series of experiments is being conducted at Sandia National Laboratories to investigate the characteristics of fuel removal and freezing through the upper axial blankets of an LMFBR during the transition phase of a hypothetical core disruptive accident. The second experiment in this series, TRAN B-2, was performed in July 1983. This experiment involved the injection of a mixture of 95% UO2 and 5% stainless steel into a simple thick-walled steel cylindrical flow channel. The initial temperature of the steel channel was low, such that melting of the walls upon contact with the hot melt was not expected. Previous experiments under similar conditions but using pure UO2 melts had shown stable crust growth and fairly long penetration distances. This experiment was intended to investigate whether those results were also applicable for the case of UO2/steel mixtures. The results of the TRAN B-2 experiment, consisting of data from online instrumentation and post-irradiation examination, suggest that low steel content fuel/steel mixtures behave very similarly to pure UO2 melts.