Investigation of the dynamics of transverse oscillations of a vertical rod under gravity, friction, and thermal expansion

The paper considers the mathematical formulation of the problem of transverse oscillations of a vertical rod under gravity, friction and external pulse effect, leading to thermal expansion of the rod. The dynamics of the system under consideration corresponds to the behavior of a fuel element (FE) in a pulsed reactor and is related to the dynamic stability of the processes occurring in it.

The FE dynamics is described by inhomogeneous linear differential equation of the fourth order with non-constant coefficients. Initial boundary conditions are not smooth since they correspond to the instant heating of the part of the FE surface exposed to neutron pulse radiation. The general solution of the homogeneous linear equation can be found using the concept of generalized functions expressed as a series expansion in terms of coordinate eigenfunctions dependent on $p$ parameter. The $p$ parameter is related with the FE mass and at some certain values results in bifurcation points of the boundary value problem for eigenfunctions. The partial solution can be found in several ways: using the Fourier transform, the method of Green's function, and in terms of series expansion by eigenfunctions.

Eigenfunction expansion coefficients in an explicit form have been obtained and the numerical solution accuracy has been estimated for some important particular cases. The results of the obtained exact solutions appear to be very close to the results of the ANSYS numerical estimations. In the future the obtained exact solutions will be used as input data to simulate self-consistent system dynamics of more than 400 FE. Therefore, the advantage of the exact solution in practical use is that its calculation is much faster as compared with the finite element method done with ANSYS.