A novel liquid lithium jet-cooled finger-type divertor target concept for fusion power plant application

Abstract

The divertor target is the most thermally loaded plasma-facing component in a foreseen DEMO reactor and beyond, which has to tolerate the peak high heat fluxes of up to ∼20 MW m−2 produced by intense plasma bombardment, radiation and nuclear heating. However, none of current designs including water-cooled and helium-cooled concepts can satisfy this requirement. Motivated by the excellent power removal capacity of liquid metal coolant and combined with the structure characteristics of the finger-type helium-cooled target, a novel concept of liquid Li jet-cooled finger-type divertor target for DEMO reactors was proposed in this paper. The performance analysis, including thermal-hydraulics analysis, mechanical analysis and MHD effects analysis, have shown that the proposed design can withstand 20 MW m−2 heat load because the temperatures of the structural materials remain within the thermal rules and the maximum thermo-mechanical stress in the VM-W thimble is approximately 484 MPa appearing in the round corner, which is below the 3S m limit at the corresponding temperature. Moreover, a theoretical and empirical analysis has confirmed that MHD effects on pressure drop and heat transfer is rather limited in the design. The comparison of this new design with other representative designs including water-cooled ITER-like target design and helium-cooled modular jet target design has been made, and the results shows that the proposed liquid Li cooled target design has better performance under 20 MW m−2 high heat flux and ∼10 dpa neutron irradiation. Therefore, this design is promising to provide a new option for solving the DEMO reactor divertor heat removal issues. Certainly, a large number of R&D efforts are still needed to ensure the success of this concept, particularly in the areas of materials, fabrication and irradiation.