Thermal analysis of the tile impacted by concentrated heat loads caused by the loss of an upstream tile


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ITER Team (Garching, Germany) - International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor


Following problem has been under consideration:
- tile evaporation resulting in the loaded surface erosion (part of surface material is brushed out); - redistribution of the temperature field and heat fluxes inside the armour and heat sink due to highly concentrated lateral heat load and surface burn-out;
- shifting of the heat removal mode closer to CHF.

Besides the above-mentioned points of interest, the obtained results of the thermal analysis (temperature and heat flux distribution near tile/heat sink joints) might be applied further for the mechanical analysis of the consequences caused by the tile failure.

To resolve the problem discussed above, first of all, it was necessary to develop a new code (2-D at least) with ability to simulate the evolution in time of the surface profile due to its expected erosion, because the available and widely used for thermal and stress analysis codes, such as ANSYS, COSMOS, ABACUS, are not able to do that.

As a such, the following objectives were formulated for the performed study:
- to develop the mathematical model, which allows us to simulate all peculiarities of the process being under consideration;
- basing on the thermal analysis performed by the developed code to investigate possible consequences of a flat tile failure with the ultimate goal to define the design options and operational parameters window make possible to avoid the cascade effect during transients.

An experience on the development of codes for simulation of the high heat flux and the solid surface interactions (simulation of plasma-surface interaction at plasma disruption in tokamaks [2,3,4,5], evaluation of heat transfer in multilayer targets, impacted by the high power electron beams [6]) was applied by authors for the development of the new code. The problem is only one of the developed previously codes were 1-D codes and, therefore, they could not be used directly in our study. The complexities of the problem lays in description and, mostly, in realization in 2-D Finite Element model the laws of the loaded surface motion due to its erosion. Finally, the optimal for the considered design options, materials and the load conditions method has been selected, which simulates the evolution of the surface profile due to the erosion by the displacement of the mesh nodes according to the given laws (the mesh compression method).



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