Analysis of the Thermo-Mechanical Behaviour of the EU DEMO Water-Cooled Lithium Lead Central Outboard Blanket Segment under an Optimized Thermal Field

Within the framework of the EUROfusion research activities on the DEMO Water-Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) Breeding Blanket (BB) design, a research study was performed to preliminarily optimize, from the thermal point of view, the WCLL Central Outboard Blanket (COB) segment in order to investigate its...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences 2022-02, Vol.12 (3), p.1356
Main Authors: Catanzaro, Ilenia, Bongiovì, Gaetano, Di Maio, Pietro Alessandro
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
breeding blanket
Cob
Cooling
DEMO WCLL
Design standards
FEM analysis
Finite element method
Heat
Hydraulics
Lithium
Loss of coolant accidents
Mechanical properties
Nuclear reactors
Segments
Stress
Stress distribution
Temperature distribution
Temperature requirements
Thermal design
thermo-mechanics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Within the framework of the EUROfusion research activities on the DEMO Water-Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) Breeding Blanket (BB) design, a research study was performed to preliminarily optimize, from the thermal point of view, the WCLL Central Outboard Blanket (COB) segment in order to investigate its structural behaviour under a realistic thermal field. In particular, a study of thermal analyses was performed to optimize the Double Walled Tubes and Segment Box cooling channels’ geometric configurations along the poloidal extension of the WCLL COB segment, in order to obtain a spatial temperature distribution fulfilling the thermal design requirement. Then, the thermo-mechanical analysis of the WCLL COB segment under Normal Operation (NO, representing nominal conditions), Upper Vertical Displacements Event (UVDE, representing a plasma disruption event) and Over-Pressurization (OP, representing an in-box loss of coolant accident) scenarios were carried out, assuming the previously obtained thermal field, to realistically predict displacement and stress fields. Finally, a stress linearization procedure allowed comparing the stress values obtained in some critical regions of the structure with the criteria prescribed by the reference design standard RCC-MRx. A theoretical–numerical approach based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) was followed using the commercial code Abaqus v. 6.14.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app12031356