Analysis of supercritical CO2 brayton cycle system for laser inertial confinement fusion concept reactors

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The large temperature difference between the PbLi and S-CO 2 cooling loops in a laser inertial confinement fusion reactor complicates efficient heat recovery and can degrade the performance of a conventional single-source power-conversion system. To address this issue, this study proposes a dual-heat-source recompression S-CO 2 Brayton cycle for a 200 MW laser inertial confinement fusion concept reactor. A lumped-parameter thermodynamic model was established to optimise the cycle configuration under given conditions. Subsequently, the resulting design parameters were applied to the VITARS model for steady-state validation and transient analysis. The optimized cycle achieved a thermal efficiency of 44.2%, with an S-CO 2 mass flow rate of 782.90 kg/s and a pressure range of 9.236-25.00 MPa. During a reduction in reactor power from 100% to 80%, the turbine output decreased smoothly to approximately 90 MW and the system reached a new steady state after about 8,000 s. A 5 K increase in cooling-water temperature increased the final mass flow rate by 2.02%. These results demonstrate that the proposed cycle can effectively couple the dual-temperature blanket heat sources, provide competitive thermo-economic performance, and maintain stable behavior under representative transient disturbances.