A CFD Benchmark on the Thermal Hydraulic Behavior of ITER’s Vacuum Vessel

Autor: Catalán Conde, David
Přispěvatelé: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Física, Fradera Fernández, Jordi, Mas de les Valls Ortiz, Elisabet
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Popis: The current project presents a CFD Benchmark on the Thermal-Hydraulic (TH) performance of ITER’s Vacuum Vessel. The geometry has been selected to be of one of the 4 Poloidal Segments (PS), the PS#01, of a Regular Sector (RS) 5, RS#05. A commercial and an OpenSource CFD code are used in order to compare the results with a previous constrained baseline analysis. These analyses are intended to highlight the special features and capabilities that the specific codes have, and how much of an improvement is achieved compared to the Base Case using their best and recommended practices, workflow and expertise. These analyses are expected to describe the overall behavior of the system, showing the different phenomena occurring within the structure. By contrasting the different codes, while similar macroscopic performance in determined regions is obtained, a more accurate definition of this phenomena is found depending on the criteria taken for each code. Solid-fluid coupling, volumetric nuclear heat deposition, forced and natural convection and turbulence models among others, are critical aspects to be considered in order to describe the expected phenomena. Several relevant parameters are analyzed, e.g., high temperature regions, stagnation points, low heat transfer coefficients regions and flow patterns. These provide important information about the performance of the component studied in the analysis and allow a thorough comparison among codes. A more detailed analysis has also been carried out in those regions with a larger significance in terms of the description of particular phenomena. The generated results provide a valuable insight on the TH analysis of components for fusion technology applications as well as a precedent benchmark for this kind of CFD calculations. Given the nature of this study, the current regulatory agencies and the industry may find it a valuable reference. The present work is a decided step towards a wider use of CFD codes for nuclear fusion applications. Regarding numerical results, the OpenFOAM simulation has shown an improvement respect the base case by enhancing the mesh and selecting adequate numerical schemes to reach convergence. For the Star-CCM+ case it has been shown the importance on modelling the boundary layer for heat transfer simulations to better reproduce the behavior in near-wall regions. In terms of macroscopical results, there have not been found significant discrepancies in comparison with the baseline studies, showing how the initial coarse mesh presents enough detail for the general behavior of the system, despite the relevance to represent the boundary layer in favor of safety by detecting possible temperature peaks.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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