Experimental Study of an Electromagnetic Actuator for a Control Element Drive Mechanism

The control element drive mechanism is one of the major equipment of a nuclear reactor, and it controls the reactivity by providing linear movement to the control elements. It should provide highly reliable up and down movements to control elements during reactor normal operation and release the control elements freely when the scram is required to shutdown a reactor immediately in case of a reactor emergency. The control elements complete full stroke drop by gravity in a few seconds for scram. Because of these essential- and safety-related operations, the performance of a control element drive mechanism should be verified experimentally. In this paper, the test results from the lifting force test, which is one of performance verification tests for nuclear equipment, are presented, and they are compared with the finite element analysis results.