CORRELATION OF GA-4 HALF-SCALE MODEL CASK STRUCTURAL VERIFICATION TEST DATA WITH ANALYSIS

General Atomics (GA), under contract to the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE), developed the design for a new generation of legal-weight truck-mounted shipping casks to be used to transport spent fuel from commercial nuclear generating stations to an interim storage facility or a permanent repository. Under the DOE program. a one-half scale model was subjected to three drop tests from 9-meters onto an unyielding surface and four 1-meter puncture tests. After the DOE ended its cask program, GA continued private development of the casks and bas submitted licensing applications to the U.S. Regulatory Commission for the GA-4 (PWR version) and the GA-9 (BWR version) cask designs. The structural analyses were verified by the drop and puncture tests and a comparison was made between measured test data and the analyses. Axial and transverse deceleration levels predicted by the computer code GACAP were compared with corresponding levels indicated by the gauges mounted on the cask modeL Agreement was very good for maximum decelerations in the directions of most interest, e.g., axial deceleration during the end drop, and transverse deceleration during the side drop and slapdown. 'Various crush strength values for the impact limiters were considered in the analysis in order to cover the range of manufacturing tolerances for aluminum honeycomb and to account for temperature effects on crush strength. Analytical predictions for deceleration, strains, stress, and amount of honeycomb crush is presented for maximum and minimum impact limiter crush strengths. These values are compared with the half-scale model test results.