Study of the hoop fracture behaviour of nuclear fuel cladding from ring compression tests by means of non-linear optimization techniques

In this work, the hoop fracture toughness of ZIRLO® fuel cladding is calculated as a function of three parameters: hydrogen concentration, temperature and displacement rate. To this end, pre-hydrided samples with nominal hydrogen concentrations of 0 (as-received), 150, 250, 500, 1200 and 2000 ppm were prepared. Hydrogen was precipitated as zirconium hydrides in the shape of platelets oriented along the hoop direction. Ring Compression Tests (RCTs) were conducted at three temperatures (20, 135 and 300 °C) and two displacement rates (0.5 and 100 mm/min). A new method has been proposed in this paper which allows the determination of fracture toughness from ring compression tests. The proposed method combines the experimental results, the cohesive crack model, finite elements simulations, numerical calculations and non-linear optimization techniques. The parameters of the cohesive crack model were calculated by minimizing the difference between the experimental data and the numerical results. An almost perfect fitting of the experimental results is achieved by this method. In addition, an estimation of the error in the calculated fracture toughness is also provided.