Thermo-mechanical assessment of the optimized CFETR water cooled ceramic breeder blanket

Abstract The Water Cooled Ceramic Breeder (WCCB) blanket is one of the candidates for Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR). Within the framework of the engineering design of CFETR, an updated design of WCCB blanket was proposed corresponding to the latest core parameters (major radius=7.2 m, minus radius=2.2 m). Thermal-hydraulic analyses preliminarily showed the feasibility of the previous blanket design. However, the flow distribution of the blanket was unsatisfactory. Thus, optimization of cooling systems of the blanket was performed accordingly. The optimized blanket design as well as the hydraulic analysis results are presented. Then, in order to investigate the thermal-hydraulic and thermo-mechanical behaviors of the optimized WCCB blanket under normal and accidental operation scenarios, thermo-mechanical analyses were performed following a computational approach based on the Finite Element Method (FEM), using the ANSYS commercial FEM code. The obtained results were assessed in order to verify the compliance with the blanket design criteria ITER SDC-IC code. Structural feasibility of the optimized blanket design was verified.