Development of ‘Pad Element’ for detailed core deformation analyses and its verification Original Research Article

It is important to understand the deformation behaviors of FBR core in the aspects of safety and economy, and to attain more precise analyses of the core mechanics for sophistication of the core structure design. However, the interaction among subassemblies, which occurs as the result of contact between pad surfaces of adjacent subassemblies, makes the core mechanics complicated. Therefore, it is important to consider the characteristics of pads in the analysis in order to realize detailed analysis. The aim of this study is to develop special ‘Pad Element’, which owes the role to treat the interaction between subassemblies at their pads precisely. In this paper, the detailed formulation of ‘Pad Element’ and the analysis results of an example problem for verification are described.