Simulations of spouted beds for coating triso fuel particles

Spouted beds have been applied to coat nuclear fuel particles starting in 1970s, when there was renewed interest in the nuclear power due to the world-wide energy crisis and various countries have started looking at alternate safer nuclear power plants. The nuclear fuel coating has been revived recently and controlled experiments along with developed multiphase flow modeling tools are targeted to produce high quality coated particles. Process-modeling activities carried out in support of the small coater process development and how the model can help the transition from laboratory scale coaters to production scale coating equipment were presented. The modeling process is anticipated to ultimately lead to both highly detailed and low-order descriptions of the coating process that will have more than one use. Modeling will help to replicate the previous production-scale quality of the German fuel and provide approaches for improvements beyond that previously achieved. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting and Fall Showcase (Cincinnati, OH 10/30/2005-11/4/2005).