Speaker
Description
In the frame of the EU DEMO design and analysis activities, the development of a system-level thermal-hydraulic model (the GEneral Tokamak THErmal-hydraulic Model – GETTHEM) of the EU DEMO tokamak has been recently launched at Politecnico di Torino, with the aim of building a tool which would allow a reasonably fast simulation of the entire power conversion system. The GETTHEM development focused so far on the Breeding Blanket (BB) cooling loops, as the BB is the component which has to remove the highest fraction of power from the plasma (~80 %). Taking advantage of the modular approach typical of object-oriented programming, the models for the cooling elements of both the Helium-Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) and the Water-Cooled Lithium-Lead (WCLL) BB concepts have been already developed and applied to the analysis of a demonstrative scenario. GETTHEM has so far proved to be very fast, allowing transient simulation of the nominal operation scenario of an entire blanket segment in almost real-time, and it was also used to analyse the evolution of accidental transients, such as an in-vessel Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA), for both coolant options.
In this paper, we present the first application of the HCPB module of the tool, which has been updated to the most recent HCPB design, to the parametric evaluation of different plasma scenarios. In particular, the effect of the variation of the heat load caused by some plasma transient events, both operating and off-normal (e.g. due to plasma instabilities) on the overall cooling performance of an entire blanket segment is shown and discussed. Particular attention is devoted to the temperature distribution in the EUROFER structure, which should be kept below the design margin of 550 °C.
| Eligible for student paper award? | No |
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