On scalable liquid-metal MHD solvers for fusion breeder blanket multiphysics applications

Abstract

While substantial research effort has been made recently in the development of computational liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) solvers, this has typically been confined to closed-source and commercial codes. This work aimed to investigate some open-source alternatives. Two OpenFOAM-based MHD solvers, mhdFoam and epotFoam, were found to show strong scaling profiles typical of fluid dynamics codes, while weak scaling was impeded by an increase in iterations per timestep with increasing resolution. Both were found to accurately solve the Shercliff and Hunt flow problems for Hartmann numbers from 20 to 1000, except for mhdFoam which failed in the Hunt flow H a = 1000 case. A basic inductionless MHD solver was implemented in the Proteus MOOSE application as a proof of concept, using two methods referred to as the kernel method and material method. Future work will aim to build on these studies, exploring more advanced OpenFOAM MHD solvers as well as improving the Proteus MHD solver.