| Due to thermal expansion of nuclear fuel pellets the thermal gradient created in a light water reactor environment will cause fuel pellets to crack on their initial ramp to power. This multi-institutional project usesthree experiments to reproduce the thermal gradient created in a light water reactor, a resistive heating experiment, a quenching experiment, and one using the transient testing reactor. The Bison fuel performance code has several fuel crack modeling approaches built into the codethat need to be validated. Two approaches, the smeared cracking approach and extended finite element method, were used in this project to model the experiments and validate the Bison fuel performance code. The quenching experiment has run several trials for comparison to the modeled results. These experiments have been compared to models using the smeared cracking approach.Key Words:Bisonfuel performance codeValidationUranium dioxidecracking |