Preliminary design of a helium cooled molten lithium test blanket module for the ITER test in Korea

Abstract

Through a consideration of the requirements for a DEMO-relevant blanket concept, Korea (KO) has proposed a He cooled molten lithium (HCML) blanket with ferritic steel (FS) as a structural material in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program. The preliminary design and its performance of KO HCML test blanket module (TBM) are introduced in this paper. It uses He as a coolant at an inlet temperature of 300 °C and an outlet temperature up to 400 °C and Li is used as a tritium breeder by considering its potential advantages. Two layers of graphite are inserted as a reflector in the breeder zone to increase the tritium breeding ratio (TBR) and the shielding performances. A 3-D Monte Carlo analysis is performed with the MCCARD code for the neutronics and the total TBM power is designed to be 0.739 MW at a normal heat flux from the plasma side. From the analysis results with CFX-10 for the thermal–hydraulics, the He cooling path is determined and it shows that the maximum temperature of the first wall does not exceed 550 °C at the structural materials and the coolant velocities are 45 and 11.5 m/s in the first wall and breeding zone, respectively. The obtained temperature data is used in the thermal–mechanical analysis with ANSYS-10. The maximum von Mises equivalent stress of the first wall is 123 MPa and the maximum deformation of it is 3.73 mm, which is lower than the maximum allowable stress.