Electric Fuel Rod Simulator Fabrication at ORNL

Commercial vendors could not supply the high‐quality, highly instrumented electric fuel rod simulators (FRS) required for large thermal‐hydraulic safety‐oriented experiments at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the 1970s and early 1980s. Staff at ORNL designed, developed, and manufactured the simulators utilized in these safety experiments. Important FRS design requirements include (1) materials of construction, (2) test power requirements and availability, (3) experimental test objectives, (4) supporting thermal analyses, and (5) extensive quality control throughout all phases of FRS fabrication. This paper will present an overview of these requirements (design, analytics, and quality control) as practiced at ORNL to produce a durable high‐quality FRS.