3D Transient CFD Simulation of an In-Vessel Loss-of-Coolant Accident in the EU DEMO WCLL Breeding Blanket

Abstract

The in-vessel Loss-of-Coolant Accident (LOCA) is one of the design basis accidents in the design of the EU DEMO tokamak fusion reactor. System-level codes are typically employed to analyse the evolution of these transients. However, being based on a lumped approach, they are unable to quantify localised quantities of interest, such as local pressure peaks on the vacuum vessel walls, to which the failure criteria are linked. To calculate local quantities, the 3D nature of the phenomenon needs to be considered. In this work, a 3D transient model of the in-vessel LOCA from a water-cooled blanket is developed. The model is implemented in the commercial CFD software STAR-CCM+. It simulates the propagation of the water jet in the vessel from the beginning of the accident, thus accounting for the phase change of the water, i.e., from the pressurised liquid phase to the vapour phase inside the vessel, being the latter at a much lower pressure than in the blanket coolant pipes. Due to the large pressure ratio (>1000), shocks are expected; therefore, an Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) algorithm is employed. The physical models (in particular, the multiphase model) are benchmarked to a 2D reference problem before being applied to the 3D EU DEMO-relevant problem. The simulation results show that the pressure peaks in front of the vessel walls are not dangerous as they are below the design limit. The entire evolution of the water jet is followed up to the opening of the burst disks, in order to compare the average pressure evolution with that computed with system-level codes. A comparison with the in-vessel LOCA from a helium-cooled blanket is also carried out, showing that the accident evolution in the water case is less violent than in the helium case.