Research on manufacture technology of spherical fuel elements by dry-bag isostatic pressing

The steady development of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors(HTRs) has increased the requirements for the production cost and quality of fuel elements. Green fuel element pressing is one of the key steps to increase the production capacity. This paper proposes a proprietary vacuum dry-bag isostatic pressing(DIP) apparatus. The structural change of the matrix graphite powder during the DIP process was examined by analyzing the density change of the matrix graphite spheres with pressure. The soft molding process was simulated using the finite element method. The dimensional changes in the spheres during the pressing, carbonization, and purification stages were explored. The performance of the fuel matrix produced by the DIP method was comprehensively examined. The fuel matrix met the technical requirements and its anisotropy was significantly reduced. The DIP method can significantly improve both the production efficiency and quality of fuel elements. This will play a key role in meeting the huge demand for fuel elements of HTRs and molten salt reactors.

Oxidation Behaviour of the Matrix Materials in Spherical Fuel Elements

The oxidation resistance of the matrix materials is vital to the normal operation of HTGR and is also an important parameter for evaluating the safety response under accidental air or water ingress conditions. The oxidation kinetics of the three matrix material components: natural graphite, artificial graphite and resin carbon. was studied in a flowing gas mixture of oxygen and nitrogen using an auto thermogravimetric system. The results indicate that the artificial graphite has the slowest oxidation rate followed by the natural graphite and then the resin carbon with the highest oxidation rate. Vacuum heat treatment of the natural graphite at 1950℃ decreases the impurities and increases the oxidation activation energy. Differences between the activation energy and the oxidation rate of the resin carbon heat treated at 1950℃ and 1600℃ resulted from changes in the micro-pore texture. and the reduction of impurities.

Elliptical formation control based on relative orbit elements

A new set of relative orbit elements（ROEs）is used to derive a new elliptical formation flying model.In-plane and out-of-plane motions can be completely decoupled,which benefts elliptical formation design.The inverse transformation of the state transition matrix is derived to study the relative orbit control strategy.Impulsive feedback control laws are developed for both in-plane and out-of-plane relative motions.Control of in-plane and out-of-plane relative motions can be completely decoupled using the ROE-based feedback control law.A tangential impulsive control method is proposed to study the relationship of fuel consumption and maneuvering positions.An optimal analytical along-track impulsive control strategy is then derived.Different typical orbit maneuvers,including formation establishment,reconfguration,long-distance maneuvers,and formation keeping,are taken as examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control laws.The effects of relative measurement errors are also considered to validate the high accuracy of the proposed control method.

Research on the Silicon Carbide Layer of Coated Fuel Particles

The 10MW high temperature gas-cooled test reactor (HTR-10) under construction at INET uses whole ceramic fuel elements. The main barrier which prevents fission product release is the SiC layer of the coated fuel particles. Fabrication of high quality SiC layers is one of the key R&D tasks for the HTR-10 fuel element. The SiClayer was deposited on the fuel particles in a 50 mm conical fluidized bed using the CVD (chemical vapour deposition) technique. The density, thickness, strength and elastic modulus of the SiC layer were measured. The microstructure was observed using SEM (scanning electron microscope ). Parameters were established for manufacturing the SiC layer of the coated fuel particles to be used in the HTR-10. It was found that the traditional density measurement by the sink-float method is questionable in the low density region and that the SiC layer may be contaminated by uranium under certain conditions.

Conditioning the γ spectrometer for activity measurement at very high background

The application of a high purity Germanium （HPGe） γ spectrometer in determining the fuel element burnup in a future reactor is studied. The HPGe detector is exposed by a 60Co source with varying irradiation rate from 10× 103m s-1 to 150× 103m s-1 to simulate the input counting rate in real reactor environment. A 137Cs and a 152Eu source are positioned at given distances to generate a certain event rate in the detector with the former being proposed as a labeling nuclide to measure the burnup of a fuel element. It is shown that both the energy resolution slightly increasing with the irradiation rate and the passthrough rate at high irradiation level match the requirement of the real application. The influence of the background is studied in the different parameter sets used in the specially developed procedure of background subtraction. It is demonstrated that with the typical input irradiation rate and 137Cs intensity relevant to a deep burnup situation, the precision of the 137Cs counting rate in the current experiment is consistently below 2.8%, indicating a promising feasibility of utilizing an HPGe detector in the burnup measurement in future bed-like reactors.