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.

The Water Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) breeding blanket concept is the one of
the PbLi-based concepts under development within the framework of the EUROfusion
project. This concept is characterized by cooling the PbLi using water tubes embedded in
the PbLi flow. In this work, the MHD coupling between the conductive tubes walls and the
PbLi flow is studied for the geometrical and operational configuration of the WCLL.
Velocity profiles are computed first considering a toroidal magnetic field using a fully

The interaction between the molten metal and the plasma-containing magnetic field in the breeding blanket causes the onset of a magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow. To properly design the blanket, it is important to quantify how and how much the flow features are modified compared with an ordinary hydrodynamic flow. This paper aims to characterize the evolution of the fluid inside one of the proposed concepts for DEMO, the Water-Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL), focusing on the central cell of the equatorial outboard module.

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.