Vibrations of roll swage jointed plates

Abstract

The aim of this work is to model the vibrational behaviour of thin plates joined to a stiff orthogonal side plate using the technique of ‘roll swaging’. Swage joints are typically found in plate-type fuel assemblies for nuclear reactors. Since they are potentially liable to flow-induced vibrations, it is crucial to be able to predict their dynamic characteristics. It is shown that the contact between the plates resulting from the swage can be modelled assuming a perfect clamp of all the degrees of freedom but the rotational around the axis parallel to the swage. A modal analysis was performed on different specimens and the values of the first natural frequencies are used to find the equivalent torsional spring stiffness, by matching these frequencies with the results obtained from a finite element model (FEM). © Authors