Speaker
Pinghui Zhao
(School of Nuclear Science and Technology)
Description
A conceptual structural design of Water-Cooled-Solid-Breeder (WCSB) blanket, one of the breeding blanket candidates for China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), is now being carried on by Institute of Plasma Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP). To validate the reliability of the designed blanket module, detailed thermal-hydraulic analysis is necessary. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, which can accurately simulated the three dimensional (3D) velocity and temperature fields, is a promising approach to thermal-hydraulic analysis of the whole blanket module. However, it usually takes a great deal of computing resources by 3D method due to its complicated and huge structure. Therefore, the possibility of CFD method applied for the whole blanket module needs to be deeply analyzed. In this paper, we try to study the hydraulic performance of the whole WCSB blanket module using CFD method. Firstly, each component, such as the first wall (FW), breeding region, and side wall, is simulated one by one to investigate grid independence and turbulent model. Based on these analyses the computation of the whole blanket module is finally completed. The results demonstrate that grids have a great effect on the flow distributions. Around 33 million meshes are needed for grid independence. And it takes the computer with 24 processors about 10 hours to complete one computation. The results also show that the total pressure drop of the whole blanket is close to 0.215 MPa and the flow distributions in most regions are uniform. However, the maximum unevenness of flow distributions appears in the first wall (FW). These results consequently indicate that the present design of FW is unreasonable since the mal-distribution may result in local overheating. Obviously, these 3D simulations can provide very good basis for accurate design of the whole blanket module.
Co-authors
Kecheng Jiang
(ASIPP, Hefei, China)
Pinghui Zhao
(School of Nuclear Science and Technology, USTC, Hefei, China)
Songlin Liu
(ASIPP, Hefei, China)
Weiping Deng
(School of Nuclear Science and Technology, USTC, Hefei, China)
Xuebin Ma
(ASIPP, Hefei, China)
Zhihao Ge
(School of Nuclear Science and Technology, USTC, Hefei, China)
