Thermal and Structural Analysis of the European Water-Cooled Lithium Lead Breeding Blanket Concept in the L-H Mode Transition

The design of a breeding blanket system (BB) which reliably fulfils the prescribed requirements is pivotal for the construction of the EU DEMO fusion reactor. For this reason, the BB conceptual design activities require a tighter interaction with plasma physics modelling, so to employ relevant boundary conditions to compare, and then down-select, the BB design alternatives. The preliminary thermo-mechanical study herein reported highlights the importance to assess in deep the BB performance during plasma operational transients. In particular, analyses of the BB thermal and mechanical transients during plasma ramp-up have been carried out, with focus on the L-H transition. Attention has been paid to the Water-Cooled Lithium Lead (WCLL) BB concept, one of the two driver blanket candidates for the EU DEMO project. Adopting DEMO-relevant plasma configurations, the fusion power and the radiative power time evolutions during the plasma ramp-up phase have been modelled under different assumptions using the code ASTRA. The obtained power transients have been used to calculate the time-dependent nuclear power density and radiative heat flux the WCLL BB is subjected to, in order to perform the corresponding transient thermal analysis. Then, the structural analysis has been carried out in order to verify the fulfilment of the RCC-MRx structural design criteria in the most critical time steps. The performed thermo-mechanical analysis has been carried out adopting the Abaqus FEM code. Results obtained are presented and critically discussed, highlighting their importance for the EU DEMO integrated design.