TY - CONF A1 - Völzke, Holger A1 - Probst, Ulrich A1 - Wolff, Dietmar A1 - Nagelschmidt, Sven A1 - Schulz, Sebastian T1 - Investigations on the long term behavior of metal seals for spent fuel storage casks T2 - 52nd INMM Annual meeting (Proceedings) N2 - Metal seals are in common use as an essential component for the leak tight closure of transport and storage casks for spent fuel and vitrified high active waste from reprocessing. They are placed between the massive monolithic cask body made of ductile cast iron or forged steel and the primary and secondary lids, which are fixed with screws around the lid circumference, in order to ensure long term safe enclosure of the radioactive cask inventory. Hereby, long term reliable pressure forces in combination with a tight surface contact are as important as well maintained seal and surface qualities and dry and clean conditions during seal assembly and operation. A few years ago BAM started systematic investigation on the long term seal behavior with re-spect to longer storage periods and seal behavior in accidental cask scenarios with dynamic de-formations of the seal groove geometry or short term drop in pressure force up to lid lifting. BAM has developed test flanges for seals with full scale cross section diameter but much small-er outer diameter to gain representative data for metal-sealed lid systems. They are placed in appropriate testing machines for relevant mechanical loading under static and dynamic condi-tions with the ability to measure the standard helium leakage rate continuously during each test phase. This paper focuses on BAM long term tests of different seal types with aluminum and silver jackets at three different temperatures of +20°C, +100°C and +150°C under static conditions over longer periods of time. Due to creeping effects, a reduction of the pressure force does ap-pear during loading and unloading depending on prior holding times. So far, test results of up to 2 years indicate a clear correlation between seal pressure forces and holding time, temperature and seal type allowing for extrapolating to much longer periods of time. The paper presents basic correlations, test and evaluation procedures as well as important provisional results and gives an outlook on further investigations. T2 - 52nd INMM Annual meeting CY - Palm Desert, CA, USA DA - 17.07.2011 PY - 2011 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/24173 AN - OPUS4-24173 SP - 1 EP - 9 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany