Design of uninstrumented irradiation subassembly type-D (UNIS-D)

Okamoto, Kaoru; Miyakawa, Shunichi; Mitsugi, Takeshi ; Kitamura, Ryoichi

In the needs of the fuel irradiation test in "Joyo" MK-III core, there have been required that the irradiation of high performance fuel at high liner heat rate to high burn-up range, or the irradiation of advanced fuel such as MA fuel and Vipac fuel. In order to carry out these irradiation tests, newly designed irradiation subassembly is required with special features of; (1)Capability of the re-assembling after post-irradiation examination, even if the number of fuel in the identical irradiation condition decreases because of intermediate inspection. (2)Enhanced flexibility of the irradiation temperature setting ( in the present, UNIS-B's has 6 cases on the maximum). (3)Sufficient flexibility for the coolant flow distribution in the subassembly by extending variety of the flow rate setting. UNIS-D is a fuel irradiation subassembly which has been developed from above viewpoints. It is a compartment loading type irradiation subassembly that is able to load maximum of 18 compartments. Two types of compartments -type and -typc arc prepared for UNIS-D. Thc sufficient consideration has also been made on the rc-assembling. A -type is the same compartment as the existing UNIS-B's and a -type is the newly designed one for UNIS-D. Three to five fuel pins are loaded into a -type compartment and only one pin is loadcd into a -type compartment. It is possible to carry out the irradiation test in a maximum of 18 test temperature conditions within a subassembly, since it has the sufficient flexibility for the coolant flow distribution. As for the development of UNIS-D, we have finished the detailed structure design and the design verification by the water flow examination, which confirmed that the UNIS-D exceeded its required performances in use and that its structure design was satisfactory.