Consideration of the effects on fuel particle behavior from shrinkage cracks in the inner pyrocarbon layer

The fundamental design for a gas-cooled pebble bed reactor relies on an understanding of the behavior of coated particle fuel. The coating layers surrounding the fuel kernels in these spherical particles consist of pyrolytic carbon layers and a silicon carbide (SiC) layer. These coating layers act as a pressure vessel that retains fission product gases. A small percentage of fuel particles may fail during irradiation in the mode of a traditional pressure vessel failure. Fuel performance models used to predict particle behavior have traditionally been one-dimensional models that focus on this failure mechanism. Results of irradiation experiments, however, show that many more fuel particles fail than would be predicted by this mechanism alone. Post-irradiation examinations indicate that multi-dimensional effects, such as the presence of shrinkage cracks in the inner pyrolytic carbon layer (IPyC), contribute to these unexplained failures. Results of a study performed to evaluate the significance of cracking in the IPyC layer on behavior of a fuel particle are presented herein, which indicate that shrinkage cracks could contribute significantly to fuel particle failures.