3D MHD analysis of prototypical manifold for liquid metal blankets

Abstract

Abstract The water-cooled lead lithium (WCLL) and the dual-cooled lead lithium (DCLL) are two of the breeding blanket (BB) concepts that the EUROfusion consortium is pursuing in the framework of the development of the fusion reactor industrial demonstrator DEMO. Both involve the use of a liquid metal (LM) as working fluid, the lead-lithium eutectic alloy (PbLi), due to its excellent thermal properties and the possibility to serve as both the blanket coolant and tritium breeder and carrier. Unfortunately, due to the high electrical conductivity of LMs, their motion is influenced by the magnetic field used in the reactor to confine the plasma, generating a complex phenomenology which is studied by magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). In this work, a representative prototypical manifold of a BB bottom feeder is investigated for different configurations with the custom phiFoam solver, capable of simulating unsteady, incompressible and isothermal MHD flow. The aim of this study is to investigate which configuration minimizes the flow imbalance in the manifold for the WCLL or in the poloidal breeding zone channels for the DCLL. The distribution of the flow rate among the channels is strongly influenced by the position of the feeding pipe (FP) and by the development of the MHD internal layer near the expansion, which generates important jets close to the lower plate and the upper one, where the channels are attached. The channel aligned with the FP is the one carrying most of the flow, from 55% to 82%, while in the more distant one the flow is almost stagnant, carrying from 17% to 6% of the total flow rate. The total pressure loss is also estimated and its functional dependence on the manifold configuration is discussed.