Structural analysis of plate-type fuel assemblies and development of a non-destructive method to assess their integrity

•A plate-type fuel assembly is made of thin plates mounted in a box-like structure.•Drag force from the coolant can shift the plates.•A non invasive method is proposed to test the strength of the plate connections.•The natural frequencies’ shift is used to assess the fuel integrity. This work is concerned with the structural behaviour and the integrity of parallel plate-type nuclear fuel assemblies. A plate-type assembly consists of several thin plates mounted in a box-like structure and is subjected to a coolant flow that can result in a considerable drag force. A finite element model of an assembly is presented to study the sensitivity of the natural frequencies to the stiffness of the plates’ junctions. It is shown that the shift in the natural frequencies of the torsional modes can be used to check the global integrity of the fuel assembly while the local natural frequencies of the inner plates can be used to estimate the maximum drag force they can resist. Finally a non-destructive method is developed to assess the resistance of the inner plates to bear an applied load. Extensive computational and experimental results are presented to prove the applicability of the method presented.