Speaker
Description
Reliable thermal-hydraulic assessment of Helium-Cooled Pebble Bed (HCPB) breeder blankets is essential to guarantee temperature limits, tritium extraction performance, and structural integrity under fusion-relevant loads. In this work, an open-source workflow for HCPB thermal--hydraulic analysis is presented, spanning from pin-level conjugate heat transfer to system-level blanket modelling within a unified framework.
At the pin scale, a coupled 2D axisymmetric-3D conjugate heat transfer model of a representative HCPB pin is developed, resolving the solid breeder, multiplier, structural materials, and both helium purge-gas and coolant domains. The approach explicitly captures purge-gas heat-transfer behaviour and coolant thermal-hydraulic response, enabling the evaluation of local temperature distributions, effective heat-transfer coefficients, and thermal resistances across the pebble bed and structural interfaces. These high-fidelity simulations are performed using the SALAMANDER platform based on the MOOSE ecosystem, driven by volumetric power fields consistently obtained from neutronic calculations.
The pin-level results are subsequently upscaled to a reduced-order, system-level thermal-hydraulic model of a full HCPB breeder blanket. Effective properties and closure relations derived from the detailed conjugate-heat-transfer calculations are used to parameterize one-dimensional network models of the coolant and purge-gas circuits. This enables rapid exploration of operating conditions, coolant and purge-gas flow configurations, and design variants, while preserving a clear link to the underlying high-fidelity physics.
All components of the workflow from parametric geometry generation (CadQuery) and meshing (Gmsh) to multiphysics simulation (SALAMANDER/MOOSE) are fully open source, facilitating transparency, reproducibility, and collaborative development.
| Speaker affiliation | IDOM UK |
|---|
