抄録
Enhanced thermal properties of nuclear fuel UO2 have been achieved by addition of compounds like BeO and SiC. This study focuses on studying the performance of UO2-10%vol BeO using FRAPCON code and examines steady state fuel behavior at high burnup. New correlations were developed to calculate thermo-physical and thermo-mechanical properties such as thermal conductivity, thermal expansion, specific heat, specific enthalpy, emissivity, vapor pressure and creep for UO2-BeO. FRAPCON code resulting from modifications done to property subroutines was used to study fission gas release behavior. With combined effect of enhanced thermal conductivity and lower thermal expansion, fission gas release predicted by FRAPCON for UO2-BeO was found to be less than that for UO2, but results from data interpolation did not exactly match for few cases. For lower burnups and lower pressure systems, FRAPCON predictions arising out of modified properties match decently well with those obtained from data interpolations and for higher levels of burnup. Enhancement of the temperature term by a factor 1.27, in the calculation of diffusion constant resulted in a good agreement between the two values.
