Generation of heat on fuel rod in cosine pattern by using induction heating

Fuel rods are used in a nuclear reactor for fission process. When these rods are cooled by water during the heat transfer, the temperature stress causes undesirable defects in the fuel rod. Studying these defects occurring in the fuel rod in the nuclear cluster during nuclear reaction is a difficult task because fission reaction makes it difficult to analyse the changes in the rod. Hence there is a need to use a replica of the rod with similar thermal stress to study and analyse the rod for the defects. Normally the heat generated on the fuel rod follows a cosine pattern which is an inherent characteristic inside a nuclear reactor. In view of this, in this paper Induction heating method is used on a rod to create an exact replica of the cosine pattern of heat by varying the pitch of the coil. First, a MATLAB simulation is done using Simulink. Then a prototype of the model has been developed comprising of carbon steel pipe, with length and outside diameter of 1 meter and 48.2 mm, respectively. Instead of using water as coolant, rod is simulated in air. Therefore, the heat generated is lost by normal convection and radiation. Non-nuclear testing can be a valuable tool in the development or in some kind of experiment using nuclear reactor. Induction heating becomes an alternative to classical heating technologies because of its advantages such as efficiency, quickness, safety, clean heating and accurate power control.