Monolithic UMo/Al fuel plates have a promising prospect in the advanced research and test reactors because of their high equivalent uranium density and stable irradiation performance. They will undergo complicated in-pile thermo-mechanical behavior, which may affect their lifetime and the safety of nuclear reactors. It is necessary to capture the effect of fuel meat thickness on in-pile thermo-mechanical behavior evolution in the fuel plates in order to realize their optimized design and control their service safety. In this study, considering a non-uniform irradiation condition, several 3D finite element models are built to simulate the in-pile behavior in different-thickness UMo/Al plates. The user subroutines are programmed based on the thermo-mechanical constitutive relations and stress update algorithms of the constituent materials. The influences of fuel meat thickness on the temperature field, the main deformations and the interfacial normal stresses are numerically investigated based on the obtained results.

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