Alejandro Soba

TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe the main phenomena occurring in a fuel rod throughout its life under normal operation conditions of a nuclear thermal reactor, including elastic and plastic stress and strain, creep, swelling and densification, release of fission gases, caesium and iodine to the rod free volume, gas mixing, pressure increase, restructuring and grain growth in the UO 2 pellet, irradiation growth of the Zircaloy cladding, oxide layer growth on its surface, hydrogen uptake and the effects of a corrosive atmosphere either internal or external.

TL;DR: The DIONISIO code results are compared with some 33 experiments compiled in the IFPE data base, that cover more than 380 fuel rods irradiated up to average burnup levels of 40–60 MWd/kgU, and reveal the good quality of the simulations.

TL;DR: In this article, a simplified analysis of the coolant in a PWR, restricted to the more representative situations and providing to the fuel simulation the boundary conditions necessary to reproduce accidental situations is presented.

TL;DR: The DIONISIO code describes most of the main phenomena occurring in a fuel rod during normal operation of a nuclear power reactor, starting from the irradiation history, the code predicts the temperature distribution, elastic and plastic stress and strain, creep, swelling and densification, release of fission gases, caesium and iodine to the internal rod volume, gas mixing, pressure increase, irradiation growth of the cladding, development of an oxide layer on its surface and hydrogen uptake, restructuring and grain growth in the pellet as mentioned in this paper.