Hybrid 1D + 2D Modelling for the Assessment of the Heat Transfer in the EU DEMO Water-Cooled Lithium-Lead Manifolds

Antonio Froio, Andrea Bertinetti, Alessandro Del Nevo and Laura Savoldi
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Antonio Froio: NEMO Group, Dipartimento Energia “Galileo Ferraris”, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy
Andrea Bertinetti: NEMO Group, Dipartimento Energia “Galileo Ferraris”, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy
Alessandro Del Nevo: ENEA FSN-ING-SIS, CR Brasimone, 40032 Camugnano (BO), Italy
Laura Savoldi: MAHTEP Group, Dipartimento Energia “Galileo Ferraris”, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino, Italy

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-23

Abstract: The European demonstration fusion power reactor (EU DEMO) tokamak will be the first European fusion device to produce electricity and to include a breeding blanket (BB). In the framework of the design of the EU DEMO BB, the analysis of the heat transfer between the inlet and outlet manifold of the coolant is needed, to assess the actual cooling capability of the water entering the cooling channels, as well as the actual coolant outlet temperature from the machine. The complex, fully three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer problem is reduced here with a novel approach to a simpler one, decoupling the longitudinal and transverse scales for the heat transport by developing correlations for a conductive heat-transfer problem. While in the longitudinal direction a standard 1D model for the heat transport by fluid advection is adopted, a set of 2D finite elements analyses are run in the transverse direction, in order to lump the 2D heat conduction effects in suitable correlations. Such correlations are implemented in a 1D finite volume model with the 1D GEneral Tokamak THErmal-hydraulic Model (GETTHEM) code (Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy); the proposed approach thus reduces the 3D problem to a 1D one, allowing a parametric evaluation of the heat transfer in the entire blanket with a reduced computational cost. The deviation from nominal inlet and outlet temperature values, for the case of the Water-Cooled Lithium-Lead BB concept, is found to be always below 1.4 K and, in some cases, even to be beneficial. Consequently, the heat transfer among the manifolds at different temperatures can be safely (and conservatively) neglected.

Keywords: nuclear fusion; EU DEMO; breeding blanket; water-cooled lithium-lead (WCLL); thermal-hydraulics; system-level modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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