Ricerc@Sapienza

This work studies numerically the flow around an electrically insulated heating cylinder, bounded by walls of non-uniform electrical conductivity and subjected to a transversal magnetic field, with non-null components in the toroidal and poloidal directions. The configuration is representative of a typical breeding blanket segment in tokamak fusion reactors: to minimize magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pressure drops, the liquid metal can be employed just as tritium breeder, whereas a non-conductive secondary fluid is used as coolant.

Magnetohydrodynamic pressure drops are one of the main issues for liquid metal blanket in fusion reactors. Minimize the fluid velocity at few millimeters per second is one strategy that can be employed to address the problem. For such low velocities, buoyant forces can effectively contribute to drive the flow and therefore must be considered in the blanket design. In order to do so, a CFD code able to represent magneto-convective phenomena is required. This work aims to gauge the capability of ANSYS© CFX-15 to solve such cases.