Tomographic reconstructions and predictions of radial void distribution in BWR fuel bundle with part-length rods

The Westinghouse FRIGG facility, in Västerås/Sweden, is dedicated to the measurement of critical power,stability and pressure drop in fuel rod bundles under BWR operating conditions (steady-state andtransient). Capability to measure cross-sectional void and radial void distributions during steady-stateoperation was already considered when the facility was built in the late 1960s, using gamma transmissionmeasurements. In the 1990s, redesigned equipment was installed to allow for full 2D tomography andsome test campaigns were successfully run where the void was measured in the Westinghouse SVEA-96fuel bundle geometry with and without part-length rods. In this paper, the tomographic raw data from the SVEA-96 void measurement campaigns are revisitedusing various tomographic reconstruction techniques. This includes an algebraic method and a filteredback-projection method. Challenges, for example due to artifacts created by high difference in gammaabsorption, or to accurately identify the location of the bundle structure, are resolved. The resultingdetailed void distributions are then averaged over entire sub-channels or within the steam core only, forcomparison against sub-channel simulations. The resulting void distributions are compared against sub-channel void predictions using the VIPREW/MEFISTO code. The region downstream the part-length rods are of particular interest to investigatehow the void in the steam core is redistributed within the open region of the bundle. The comparisonshows a reasonable agreement between the measurements and the predictions.