Study on the Influencing Factors of Temperature Field Based on PWR Water-Cooled Blanket for DEMO Reactor

Demonstration fusion reactor (DEMO) will aim to fulfill the tritium self-sufficiency in fuel recycling and generate economical fusion energy in the future. The tritium breeding blanket is one of the key components inside the vacuum vessel of a fusion reactor. Achieving tritium self-sufficiency is one of the most important goals, which involves whether fusion reactors can achieve fuel cycle and sustained stable operation. Furthermore, the tritium release efficiency is also an important factor affecting the operation of DEMO, which is intimately related to the temperature field inside the breeding blanket. Consequently, the research is focused on the thermal principles of thermal hydraulics in the breeding blanket for the tritium generation process. In this work, a preliminary study considering the blanket structure and the cooling conditions based on a PWR water-cooled blanket was carried out. A neutronics model was established using the Monte Carlo N Particle Transport Code (MCNP) and the nuclear heat distribution in the blanket was analyzed. The nuclear heat is used as the preprocessing data for thermal calculation. The ANSYS code is used to perform the finite element technique analysis on the coolant parameters related to the temperature field, such as the inlet velocity, pipe diameter, pipe spacing, and so on. The breeding blanket met the temperature requirements while also possessing ideal tritium release performance. This work will be beneficial to the DEMO blanket design activities and as a useful reference in the future.