Progress status of the ITER Vacuum Vessel sectors manufacturing design thermal hydraulic performance

Abstract

The present work exposes the 3D steady state thermal hydraulic (TH) analysis of the Irregular Sector number 3 (IrS#3) of the ITER Vacuum Vessel (VV), including the Irregular Field Joints (IrFJ) by means of a commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code. The geometry of the IrS#3 has been simplified and healed in order to be suitable for CFD analysis. The simplified geometry has been meshed and converted to a polyhedral cell based mesh so as to enhance accuracy and calculation stability. Nuclear heat deposition (H) from the latest C Lite model [1] has been implemented through several User Defined Functions (UDF). Water coolant and stainless steel shell are solved together as a steady state conjugate heat transfer problem in order to assess the impact of the nuclear heat deposition on the IrS#3 cooling scheme. Hence, the IrS#3 is simulated as a whole, without splitting the domain.Results show the total IrS#3 pressure drop as well as the flow and temperature distribution all over the IrS#3. Moreover, the heat transfer coefficient (h) has been calculated at the fluid-solid interface. Velocity magnitude in the water coolant has an average value of 0.10m/s and mass flow rate distribution is 11% and 89% respectively for Inboard and Outboard. The pressure drop, mainly concentrated at inlet and outlet ducts, is of 77.4kPa. The average h is of 5 690W/(m2K), way above the design limit of 500W/(m2K). The fluid temperature stays at an average value of 101.7°C. The results obtained have a significant importance regarding design and safety and give a valuable insight on the current cooling scheme and system behavior for the IrS#3 of the ITER VV. This follows a previous work presenting the methodology and the results of a 3D TH analysis of the Irregular Sector number 2 (IrS#2) of the ITER Vacuum Vessel (VV) by means of CFD [2].