Influence of thermal performance on design parameters of a He/LiPb dual coolant DEMO concept blanket design

• Published in: Fusion engineering and design 2012-08, Vol.87 (7-8), p.969-973
• Main Authors: Mas de les Valls, E., Batet, L., de Medina, V., Fradera, J., Sanmartí, M., Sedano, L.A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blanketing; Breeding blanket; Buoyant flows; Computational fluid dynamics; Design engineering; Magnetohydrodynamics; Mathematical models; MHD; Specifications; TECNO_FUS; Thermal properties
• ISSN: 0920-3796; 1873-7196
• DOI: 10.1016/j.fusengdes.2012.02.074

Spanish Breeding Blanket Technology Programme TECNO_FUS is exploring the technological capabilities of a Dual-Coolant He/Pb15.7Li breeding blanket for DEMO and studying new breeding blanket design specifications. The progress of the channel conceptual design is being conducted in parallel with the extension of MHD computational capabilities of CFD tools and the underlying physics of MHD models. A qualification of MHD effects under present blanket design specifications and some approaches to their modelling were proposed by the authors in [1]. The analysis was accomplished with the 2D transient algorithm from Sommeria and Moreau [2] and implemented in the OpenFOAM CFD toolbox [3]. The thermal coupling was implemented by means of the Boussinesq hypothesis. Previous analyses showed the need of improvement of FCI thickness and thermal properties in order to obtain a desirable liquid metal temperature gain of 300°C. In the present study, an assessment through sensitivity and parametric analyses of the required FCI thickness is performed. Numerical simulations have been carried out considering a Robin-type thermal boundary condition which assumes 1D steady state thermal balance across the solid FCI and Eurofer layers. Such boundary condition has been validated with a fluid–solid coupled domain analysis. Results for the studied flow conditions and channel dimensions show that, in order to obtain a liquid metal temperature gain of about 300°C, the required FCI material should have a very small effective heat transfer coefficient ((k/δ)≤1W/m2K) and fluid velocities should be about 0.2m/s or less. Moreover, special attention has to be placed on the temperature difference across the FCI layer. However, for a maximised liquid metal thermal gain, higher velocities would be preferable, what would also imply a reduced temperature difference across the FCI layer.