Gas Leakage Test for Radioactive Materials Transport Package With Vibration

Abstract Radioactive materials transport packages (RMTP) are the key equipments to ensure the safe transportation of radioactive materials, which can play a variety of important functions. Among them, the containment sealing function is an important safety requirement for RMTP containing radioactive contents such as gases and powders. The realization of the sealing for RMTP is not only to safeguard the quality of the contents and to prevent any reduction in the quantities of the contents. The leakage rate requirement should be determined at the design stage, which is as the criterion for judging the conformity of the sealing performance. And a suitable detection test method should be selected to carry out gas leakage test. Currently, gas leakage test for RMTP is mainly used to verify the sealing performance at the normal condition and the condition after tests required by IAEA SSR-6. However, the effects of different vibration conditions during transportation on the RMTP sealing performance are not taken into account. Therefore, the effects of vibration on the RMTP has been studied by experiment. Helium mass spectrometer leak detector and cladding inflation-gas detector method were used in the study. A scaled-down RMTP model and a small vibration test equipment were used carry out constant-frequency vibration tests. It was found that the cumulative effect of vibration causes the gas leakage rate increase for RMTP and it increases with the number of vibration tests.