As part of an ongoing International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cooperative research project on accident tolerant fuel (ATF) designs, the guest editors are leading an international team of university faculty members and graduate students, and other researchers to develop a publicly available material property library for ATF materials. It will include the critical review and summary of relevant models and correlations (M&Cs) described in the open literature, development of recommended modeling approaches and correlations for inclusion in fuel behavior models and codes, and assessment of the recommended approaches using publicly available integral and separate effects experiments. The recommended M&Cs will also be implemented as an ATF option for the MATPRO-based program library used in in a variety of steady state/transient fuel behavior and system thermal hydraulic codes such as RELAP/SCDAPSIM. RELAP/SCDAPSIM and other system thermal hydraulic codes will be used to analyze relevant integral experiments such as the German Quench bundle heating and quenching experiments to assess the M&Cs uncertainties.

Although a number of publicly available papers have been published over the past several years describing a variety of proposed ATF materials, there has been no systematic review and assessment of the proposed material property M&Cs over a range of conditions that these materials will be subjected to. The assessment of the M&Cs and the determination of their accuracy using a range of separate effects experiments has also been limited. Although some existing ATF M&Cs have been implemented into system thermal hydraulic and fuel behavior codes, the ability of these codes to describe the behavior of representative integral fuel bundle experiments has not been encouraging.

The aim of this Special Issue is to collate original research and review articles about the critical review and summary of relevant M&Cs, the recommended modeling approaches and correlations, and assessment of those modeling approaches. We welcome submissions focused on the definition, implementation, and assessment of recommended M&Cs for ATF cladding materials including Fe and Zr alloys, coated Zr alloys, and SiC. The assessment should focus on the updated analysis of recent integral experiments where experimental results are available in the open literature. We also encourage submissions focused on the inclusion of other proposed fuel and cladding materials, analysis of newly published experiments, and application of the recommended models and correlations to the analysis of representative reactor designs and transients.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Review and summary of publicly available models and correlations for ATF materials
• Improved models and correlations for ATF materials
• Implementation of models and correlations in "stand-alone" fuel behavior codes and integral system thermal hydraulic/fuel assembly behavior codes
• Assessment of ATF using combination of separate effects and integral bundle experiments
• Assessment of the impact of ATF for representative light water reactor designs and DBA/BDBA conditions