A Preliminary CFD and Tritium Transport Analysis for ARC Blanket

Ferrero, Gabriele; Meschini, Samuele; Testoni, Raffaella

doi:10.1080/15361055.2022.2096365

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Note that we refer to a general 'breeding zone' and not to the LIB, because tritium will be produced in FLiBe-containing VV and divertor channels. The residence time in the breeding zone was quantified from the steady-state tritium inventory computed by Ferrero et al [14]. FC simulations with the present model were run for different τ BZ until the breeding zone tritium inventory reached 3 g, which was the value found in [14].…”

Section: Arc-class Tokamak Model Parametersmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…CFS's ARC is in a conceptual design phase, and the specific parameters of its FC technologies and components are not finalized. In this paper, it should be understood that when we refer to ARC, we refer to a general 'ARC-class' tokamak, which is characterized by the nominal size and power parameters described in [2], a high-field confinement scheme enabled by high-temperature superconductor magnets [19,30], and an FLiBe-based LIB for tritium breeding [2,14,31]. A highlevel layout of the expected FC is shown in figure 1.…”

Section: Arc Fc Layoutmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The residence time in the breeding zone was quantified from the steady-state tritium inventory computed by Ferrero et al [14]. FC simulations with the present model were run for different τ BZ until the breeding zone tritium inventory reached 3 g, which was the value found in [14]. This resulted in a τ BZ = 1.25 h. The fuel clean-up and ISS residence time sum to 4 h for the baseline case, 1 h for a short processing time case, and 12 h for a long processing time case [1].…”

Section: Arc-class Tokamak Model Parametersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to these results, there exists 95% probability that the TBR r will be within ±2σ ∼ ±0.015 of its calculated mean value. This approach allowed to properly account for the huge uncertainty of τ BZ and η TES in STEP-Li, whose liquid lithium blanket has not been modeled yet with the same level of detail of ARC blanket [14] or STEP-EBB blanket [3]. The other FC parameters were equivalent to those used in the baseline case for the ARC-class tokamak described in table 3.…”

Section: 22mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It also provides efficient heat conduction away from the coupled first wall (FW)-VV structure, which is very important at the high power density ARC proposes. Analyses of ARC have been carried out in the fields of materials science [10][11][12], thermal analysis [13][14][15], neutronics [13,[16][17][18], and plasma physics [2,13,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Modeling and analysis of the tritium fuel cycle for ARC- and STEP-class D-T fusion power plants

Meschini,

Ferry,

Delaporte-Mathurin

et al. 2023

Nucl. Fusion

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The limited tritium resources available for the first fusion power plants (FPPs) make fuel self-sufficiency and tritium inventory minimization leading issues in FPP design. This work builds on the model proposed by M. Abdou et al. \cite{abdou2020physics}, which analyzed the fuel cycle of a DEMO-class FPP with a time-dependent system-level model. Here, we use a modified version of their model to analyze the fuel cycle of an ARC-class tokamak and two versions of a STEP-class tokamak. The ARC-class tokamak breeds tritium in a FLiBe liquid immersion blanket (LIB), while the STEP-class tokamak breeds tritium utilizing either a liquid-lithium blanket design or an Encapsulated Breeding Blanket (EBB). A time-dependent system-level model is developed in Matlab Simulink~\textregistered\hspace{.2em} to simulate the evolution of tritium flows and tritium inventories in the fuel cycle. The main goals of this work are to assess tritium self-sufficiency of the ARC- and STEP-class designs and to determine quantitative design requirements that can be used to analyze the adequacy of a proposed fuel cycle system. These design requirements are aimed at achieving a low tritium inventory doubling time ($t_d$) and a low start-up inventory ($I_{\mathrm{startup}}$) while keeping the required tritium breeding ratio (TBR$_r$) as low as possible. We also consider how improvements in fuel cycle technology and plasma operations affect TBR$_r$ and $I_{\mathrm{startup}}$. The model results show that TBR$_r$ for ARC- and STEP-class FPPs should be achievable if the tritium burn efficiency (TBE) reaches 0.5-1\% (TBR$_r <$ 1.2). This assumes significant, but attainable, improvements over current abilities. However, the model results indicate that a FPP must achieve ambitious performance targets, including FPP availability $>$70\%, tritium processing time $<$4~h, and the implementation of direct internal recycling. If future research yields major improvements to achievable TBE, it may be possible to achieve tritium self-sufficiency while operating at lower availability and without implementing DIR.

show abstract

Section: Arc-class Tokamak Model Parametersmentioning

confidence: 79%