Assessment of residual heat removal from activated breeding blanket segment during remote handling in DEMO

Abstract In this study, the temperature of the activated EU DEMO breeding blanket (BB) during the in-vessel remote handling is analyzed considering the decay heat generated inside the BB. A transient analysis of the natural convection of the injected air inside the plasma chamber has been performed using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The CFD results are exploited for tuning of a lumped model, which has been used for fast predictions of longer transients. The aim of this study is to determine the temperature and temperature gradient of the BB during the remote handling, the temperature of the circulating air as environmental condition for the RH tools, and to investigate the feasibility of residual heat removal from BB segments by natural convection of filled gas. The removal of the BB segments by remote handling (RH) is foreseen here one month after the plasma shutdown.