Development of a used fuel cladding damage model incorporating circumferential and radial hydride responses

Abstract At the completion of the fuel drying process, used fuel Zry4 cladding typically exhibits a significant population of δ -hydride inclusions. These inclusions are in the form of small platelets that are generally oriented both circumferentially and radially within the cladding material. There is concern that radially-oriented hydride inclusions may weaken the cladding material and lead to issues during used fuel storage and transportation processes. A high fidelity model of the mechanical behavior of hydrides has utility in both designing fuel cladding to be more resistant to this hydride-induced weakening and also in suggesting modifications to drying, storage, and transport operations to reduce the impact of hydride formation and/or the avoidance of loading scenarios that could overly stress the radial inclusions. We develop a mechanical model for the Zry4-hydride system that, given a particular morphology of hydride inclusions, allows the calculation of the response of the hydrided cladding under various loading scenarios. The model treats the Zry4 matrix material as J 2 elastoplastic, and treats the hydrides as platelets oriented in predefined directions (e.g., circumferentially and radially). The model is hosted by the Albany analysis framework, where a finite element approximation of the weak form of the cladding boundary value problem is solved using a preconditioned Newton–Krylov approach. Instead of forming the required system Jacobian operator directly or approximating its action with a differencing operation, Albany leverages the Trilinos Sacado package to form the Jacobian via automatic differentiation. We present results that describe the performance of the model in comparison with as-fabricated Zry4 as well as HB Robinson fuel cladding. Further, we also present performance results that demonstrate the efficacy of the overall solution method employed to host the model.

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