Preliminary Thermo-mechanical Analysis of Water Cooled Ceramic Breeder Blanket for China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor

Abstract

Bridging from ITER to DEMO, China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor aims at tritium self-sufficiency which is one of the main functions of blanket. The structure and thermo-mechanical performance influences strongly the operation and tritium breeding of blanket. In this paper, Water Cooled Ceramic Breeder blanket was designed with multilayer mixed pebble beds. And preliminary thermo-mechanical analysis has been done by the coupling of ANSYS finite element (FE) model and self-developed finite difference (FD) code under normal steady state condition. The results showed that the temperature distribution of the FE model corresponds well to that of the FD code. The obtained equivalent stress of the blanket is presented and critically verified the compliance with the SDC-IC code as reference criteria. At last, possible improvements such as adding fillets and plug-in materials are proposed to ameliorate the structure.