CRASH TESTING OF NUCLEAR FUEL SHIPPING CONTAINERS

In an attempt to understand the dynamics of extra severe transportation accidents and to evaluate state-of-the-art computational techniques for predicting the dynamic response of shipping casks involved in vehicular system crashes, a program was organized to investigate these areas. This program, which began in 1975, encompasses the following distinct major efforts. The first of these uses computational methods to predict the effects of the accident environment and, subsequently, to calculate the damage incurred by a container as the result of such an accident. The second phase involves the testing of one-eighth-scale models of transportation systems. Through the use of instrumentation and high-speed motion photography, the accident environments and physical damage mechanisms are studied in detail. After correlating the results of these first two phases, a full-scale event, involving representative hardware, is conducted. To date two of the three selected test scenarios have been completed. Results of the program to this point indicate that both computational techniques and scale modeling are viable engineering approaches for the study of accident environments and physical damage to shipping casks. /Authors/