Effects of pore characteristics on SiCf/SiC cladding equivalent Young's modulus

Abstract

BackgroundSilicon carbide composite has good stabilities in heat, mechanics and chemistry, therefore, become an important candidate cladding for accident tolerant fuel of nuclear power plant. The silicon carbide composite prepared by existing manufacturing process contains a certain amount of pores, which adversely affect mechanical properties of the composite cladding.PurposeThis study performs to investigate effects of pore characteristics on silicon carbide cladding equivalent Young's modulus.MethodsFirstly, the APP development module in finite element analysis software COMSOL was adopted to implement the random generation algorithm of pores by Java programming. Silicon carbide composite cladding models with different pore characteristics were generated by algorithmic presetting porosity, distribution and size of pores in the silicon carbide composite. Then, the equivalent Young's modulus of the corresponding SiC composite cladding was calculated quantitatively to investigate the effect of different pore characteristics on equivalent Young's modulus.Results & ConclusionsThe computational results show that the silicon carbide cladding equivalent Young's modulus can be calculated accurately by the COMSOL software. The equivalent Young's modulus decreases linearly with the increase of porosity when the distribution and size of the pores are constant whilst little effect of the distribution and size of pores is shown on the equivalent Young's modulus when the porosity is constant.

Keywords

• silicon carbide composite cladding
• pore
• pore characteristics
• comsol
• equivalent young's modulus