Structural Response of a Nuclear Spent Fuel Rail Cask to Aircraft-Like Component Impacts

Under a project funded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) examined the response of a spent fuel rail cask to impacts from hard aircraft components, such as the landing gear and the aircraft engine. The analyses were conducted using the Sandia developed non-linear transient dynamic finite element code PRONTO3D. PRONTO3D is a shock-wave propagation code developed specifically for impact analyses. It uses an explicit time integration algorithm for solving the equations of motion. For these analyses, the landing gear was modeled as a steel tube, which impacts the center region of the cask. The steel tube was modeled with two different material yield strengths and two different impact orientations, perpendicular to cask outer wall and at a 45° angle to the cask outer wall. The force of the impacting aircraft engine was modeled as a pressure pulse and was also applied at the mid-height side of the cask body. The pressure versus time loading function was developed using data acquired by SNL from GE J-79 aircraft engine impact tests [3]. The structural response of the cask for each of these load cases is presented.