The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Ispra Site (JRC-Ispra) has initiated a Decommissioning and Waste Management programme that will span about two decades. A routine waste management activity will be the packaging and related conditioning of solid Low Level Waste (LILW) identified as Category 2.
In 2012 Ansaldo Nucleare S.p.A. has been awarded a contract from JRC for the design and the qualification of the Final Waste Package (FWP) for LILW, in which the container is a carbon steel CP-5.2 type (UNI 11193).
The qualification include the so-called Free Drop tests, in which one or more specimens shall be dropped from a proper height onto a rigid target.
The tests have been performed using an analytical approach, developing various LS-Dyna FEM models to reproduce the most critical drop scenarios.
Before executing the drop tests the models have been validated making a comparison with the experimental results obtained by dropping an instrumented full-scale prototype at the Scalbatraio Centre Laboratory in Pisa.
The aim of these tests is to verify that the metallic “shell” of the container, which envelopes the waste, maintains its integrity after the impacts.