Book Description

The four primary Zircaloy fuel cladding deformation phenomena--axial elongation, circumferential creep, ovalization, and ridging--have been investigated for fuel irradiated in four modern pressurized water reactors. The axial elongation of fueled and nonfueled rods is examined by a regression fit for dependence on fluence, clad texture, yield stress, applied stress and, for fuel rods, fuel pellet length to diameter ratio. For fueled rods, only fluence and stress are found to be important, although the range of texture data is small. For nonfueled rods, the texture is found to influence elongation.