DEVELOPMENT OF DEVICE FOR DETECTING HELIUM LEAK FROM CANISTER (PART 1): EXPERIMENT ON TEMPERATURE BEHAVIOR DURING GAS LEAK FROM CANISTER OF 1/4.5 SCALE CASK MODEL

摘要

A concrete cask has an advantage in cost and period of manufacturing compared with a metal cask. In the metal cask, monitoring of helium pressure between a primary lid and a secondary lid of the cask is required by regulation. On the other hand, in the concrete cask, the lids of a canister are welded and have high sealing performance, so that the monitoring of helium leak from the canister is not required. However, a loss of the sealing performance of the secondary lid, which is caused by stress corrosion cracking (SCC), is concerned in the case of long-term storage by the concrete cask. In the view of this situation, it would be useful to install a helium leak detector in the concrete cask in order to improve the safety of the long-term storage. Thus, we have been developing the detector. The phenomenon that the temperature at the bottom of the canister (TB) increases and the temperature at the top of the canister (TT) decreases during the helium leak from the canister has been confirmed by the experiments in the previous study. We have proposed the performance monitoring by monitoring the temperature difference ΔTBT (=TB-TT) instead of pressure monitoring. This time, to make the installation and maintenance of the helium leak detector easier in consideration of practical use, we proposed a new detection technique using only the temperature of either the lid or the bottom of the canister. We performed leak tests by using a 1/4.5 scale cask model based on a similarity law of thermal hydraulics. In the experiments, air was used for an inner gas of a canister of the model, and a heat flux of a canister surface had the same value as that of the actual canister surface. In this model, Ra* number can be made to coincide with that of the actual canister. Besides, Gr* number and Bo* number are almost equal to those of the actual canister. Temperature data at respective canister parts were obtained under condition of canister internal pressure from 6 atm to 1 atm (atmosphere pressure). Also, the new and old leak detection methods were evaluated by using the obtained temperature data.