Effect of Drop Orientation on Structural Integrity of a Shipping Container for Nuclear Fresh Fuel

A shipping container of fresh fuel in nuclear industry is used to prevent a leakage of unirradiated radioactive materials and to maintain an integrity of nuclear fuels during transportation. In this study, the drop behavior was predicted and the effect of drop orientation on structural integrity of a shipping container in case of 9 m free drop was studied. LS-DYNA which is a computer code designed to perform nonlinear dynamic analysis using explicit time integration was used in numerical analyses. The material properties were applied to the analysis model to predict the nonlinear transient behavior and three kinds of drop orientations were considered. The analysis results such as accelerations, reaction forces and internal assembly deformations were compared for each case in terms of the containment and confinement systems. Test results showed that a significant impact energy was absorbed by the polyurethane foam and shock absorbers. The drop orientations that have the greatest impact on the containment and confinement systems were Case 1 and Case 3, respectively. Through this study, these study results can be applicable to the container design modification and the shipping container development