Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Exploratory Thermo-Mechanical Assessment of the Bottom Cap Region of the EU-DEMO Water-Cooled Lead Lithium Central Outboard Blanket Segment

Gaetano Bongiovi
* ORCID logo ,
Ilenia Catanzaro
ORCID logo ,
Pietro Alessandro Di Maio
ORCID logo ,
Salvatore Giambrone
ORCID logo ,
Alberto Gioè
ORCID logo ,
Pietro Arena
ORCID logo ,
Lorenzo Melchiorri
Version 1 : Received: 7 August 2023 / Approved: 8 August 2023 / Online: 8 August 2023 (07:18:48 CEST)

A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.

Bongiovì, G.; Catanzaro, I.; Di Maio, P.A.; Giambrone, S.; Gioè, A.; Arena, P.; Melchiorri, L. Exploratory Thermo-Mechanical Assessment of the Bottom Cap Region of the EU DEMO Water-Cooled Lead Lithium Central Outboard Blanket Segment. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 9812. Bongiovì, G.; Catanzaro, I.; Di Maio, P.A.; Giambrone, S.; Gioè, A.; Arena, P.; Melchiorri, L. Exploratory Thermo-Mechanical Assessment of the Bottom Cap Region of the EU DEMO Water-Cooled Lead Lithium Central Outboard Blanket Segment. Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 9812.

Abstract

The Water-Cooled Lead Lithium (WCLL) Breeding Blanket (BB) is one of the two BB concepts candidate to be selected as driver blanket for the EU-DEMO fusion reactor. In this regards, the development of a sound architecture of the WCLL Central Outboard Blanket (COB) Segment, ensuring the fulfilment of the thermal and structural design requirements, is one of the main goals of the EUROfusion consortium. To this purpose, an exploratory research campaign has been launched to preliminarily investigate the thermo-mechanical performances of the Bottom Cap (BC) region of the WCLL COB segment, because of its peculiarities making its design different from the other regions. The assessment has been carried out considering the nominal BB operating conditions, the Normal Operation (NO) scenario, as well as a steady-state scenario derived from the in-box LOCA accident, the Over-Pressurization (OP) scenario. Starting from the reference geometric layout of the WCLL COB BC region, a first set of analysis has been launched in order to evaluate its structural performances under a previously calculated thermal field and to select potential geometric improvements. Then, the analysis of a more complete BC region has been conducted from both the thermal and structural standpoints, evaluating its structural behaviour in compliance with the RCC-MRx code. Finally, after some iterations and geometric updates, a promising geometric layout of the BC region has been obtained even though some criticalities still persist in the internal Stiffening Plates and First Wall. However, the obtained results clearly showed that the proposed layout is worthy to be further assessed to achieve a robust enough configuration. The work has been performed following a theoretical-numerical approach based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) and adopting the quoted Ansys commercial FEM code.

Keywords

WCLL; breeding blanket; DEMO; thermomechanics; FEM analysis; Bottom Cap

Subject

Engineering, Energy and Fuel Technology

Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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