Influence of impact angle and real target properties on drop test results of cubic containers
(2017)
Drop test scenarios with cubic containers without impact limiters at interim storage sites or in a final repository have been investigated by numerical simulations. An ideally flat drop is impossible to conduct as a free fall of a container even under laboratory conditions. Dynamic stresses and strains inside the container structure are sensitive to the impact angle. Even very small impact angles cause remarkable changes in the experimental or numerical results when a flat bottom or wall of a container hits a flat target. For drop tests with transport packages the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations define an essentially unyielding target. In contrast, potential accident scenarios for storage containers are derived from site-specific safety analyses or acceptance criteria in Germany. Each interim storage site or repository has a yielding or so-called real target with individual structural and material properties. The real target acts as a kind of impact limiter. A more conservative container design is required if the impact limiting effect of the target is not considered.
The 9 meter drop onto an unyielding target is one of the important mechanical tests within the safety assessment of transport casks for radioactive material. In general, the cask is equipped with impact limiters to reduce the dynamic load on the cask body by absorbing a major part of the kinetic energy. The impact limiters are often made of wood or aluminium. In this study an elastic-plastic material model with volume change was used to describe the stress-strain behaviour of wood found in crush tests. For aluminium, an elastic-incremental plastic material model with Cowper-Symonds parameters for strain rate depending material hardening was used to model the adiabatic stress-strain relations measured at specimens at constant ambient temperature. Hereafter simulations with a sophisticated finite element model were carried out and compared with different drop tests. Four drop tests of a half-scale cask model equipped with wood and aluminium impact limiters with different drop positions were selected to investigate the impact limiter behaviour during a 9 meter drop test. All drop tests were simulated with the same FE mesh but under different boundary and initial conditions.
Numerical simulation of 9 meter drop of a transport and storage cask with aluminium impact limiter
(2010)
For the purpose of numerical simulation of 9 meter drop of a transport and storage cask with aluminium impact limiter, an elastic-incremental plastic material model with strain rate hardening acc. to Cowper-Symonds is used for the development of isothermal as well as adiabatic stress-strain relations of aluminium from the compression test at constant ambient temperature. After that, two different simulation strategies are compared. At first, the drop test is calculated fully coupled, i.e. with isothermal stress-strain relations and possible heat generation in the material. Then the drop test is recalculated in a very simplified manner with adiabatic stress-strain relations from the compression test in an isothermal simulation. Both calculation strategies show similar results in the investigated load scenario.