Packing behaviour of a LiTiO pebble bed under cyclic loads

Tanigawa, Hisashi; Tanaka, Yuichiro*; Enoeda, Mikio

In the temperature range from room temperature to 973 K and the mechanical loading range from 0.1 MPa to 3 MPa, LiTiO pebble bed is successively loaded and the packing behaviour of the bed is observed. Deformation caused by the mechanical loadings is partly relaxed when the bed is heated without the load. After large numbers of thermal and mechanical loadings, the packing factor of the bed with the initial packing factor of 66.9% finally reaches about 68.5%. The progress of packing leads to production of a void region at the top of the pebble bed and it is important to obtain a high packing factor for the initial packing.