The influence of MHD boundary layers on tritium permeation in PbLi flows for fusion breeding blankets

Abstract

In PbLi based breeding blanket concepts, tritium is produced inside the liquid metal and drag out of the reactor by the liquid metal flow. However, undesired permeation through the channels and pipes walls occurs spontaneously since tritium naturally diffuses in the opposite direction of the concentration gradient. This way tritium can reach the blanket coolant circuit or even the exterior with an impact on the tritium self-sustainability and the safety of the plant. Similarly to heat transfer processes, permeation through the walls in the interface between the flow and the steel is mostly affected by the dynamics of the boundary layers. This is ruled by the electrical coupling between the moving conductor and the conducting walls as a result of the Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) interactions which dominate the flow dynamics. In this work, the connection between the MHD forces and tritium transport is numerically studied using the simulation platform ANSYS-Fluent. The velocity profiles of a PbLi test channel have been firstly computed in a wide range of Hartmann numbers from 102 to 104. These velocity profiles are then applied to a 3D tritium transport model developed with the customization capabilities of the same platform. A series of tritium transport simulations are carried out considering different permeation regimes: surface-limited, diffusion-limited and intermediate regimes. The development of the concentration boundary layers along the channel is studied in different permeation regimes, magnetic fields and velocity fields. This has allowed correlating the Sherwood number (Sh) with the Hartmann (Ha), Reynolds (Re) and permeation numbers (W).