Please give a lot of attention and participation from the members of the Mechanical Engineering department.

▣ 주   제: Design Challenges of Annular Fuel

▣ 연   사: Hyung-Kyu Kim 박사

▣ 소   속: 한국원자력연구원

▣ 일   시: 2024. 6. 18.(Tue) 16:00

▣ 장   소: 제4공학관 D601호

▣ 초   청: 장용훈 교수

▣ 초   록

An innovative PWR (pressurized water reactor) fuel, a dual-cooled annular fuel, will be introduced in this seminar, in particular focusing on the challenges in mechanical design to comply with the existing fuel design criteria. The annular fuel has a unique feature of a fuel rod such that it is composed of inner and outer cladding tubes of zirconium alloy between which annular UO₂ pellets are stacked to generate heat. Fuel temperature can be considerably lowered compared with a conventional PWR fuel where the fuel rod is composed of a single tube and solid cylindrical pellets. The decrease in temperature enhances the safety of the fuel and thus nuclear power plant. Further importantly, it enables to uprate the reactor power without changing the pre-existing components of the power plant. However, the annular fuel has not been actually developed and used in the conventional PWR plants so far because there are technical difficulties which were not resolved with an acceptable conservatism, and will be considered in this talk. To this end, the seminar will begin with a general design (esp. mechanical) aspect of the PWR fuel and compared with the necessary change in design for the annular fuel. Mechanical design methods and points of mandatory design criteria are to be introduced. Therefore, it may be said that the purpose of the seminar is to show the audience (students) some actual problems occurring in the engineering field which they will be able to be faced with after graduation.