Design and optimization of the WEST ICRH antenna front face components based on thermal and hydraulic analysis

• Three ICRH antennas are designed to realize continuous-wave operation.
• Fully active cooling structure is designed which takes the balance of structure safety and cooling performance.
• High cooling efficiency is achieved for the current cooling circuit design based on the thermal-hydraulic simulation.

The WEST (Tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) is an upgrade of Tore-Supra (TS) which aims it into an X-point magnetic configuration tokamak equipped with an actively cooled tungsten divertor. To be a platform of ITER technologies of high heat flux components testing, three sets of Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH) antennas have been designed to inject 9 MW during 30 s or 3 MW during 1000 s.The antenna design is based on a load resilient prototype successfully tested in Tore Supra in 2007. In order to allow continuous-wave (CW) operations, the mechanical design of the WEST ICRH antenna is emphasized on its cooling performances by designing fully active cooling structure. Two kinds of cooling water loops are used, with temperature and pressure of 70 °C/30 bar and 25 °C/5.2 bar, respectively. The hot water loop is used for the Faraday screen (FS) and the housing box (HB), while the cold water loop is used for the straps, the matching capacitors and the impedance transformer. To enhance the heat removal ability and control the pressure drop, the cooling channels in the FS and HB are drilled directly and parallel connected as much as possible.By performing the hydraulic–thermal analysis, the lack of cooling efficiency was found in the front face of lateral collector where 1 MW/m2 is imposed and fluid dead zones were found in some of the bars. After optimization, the cooling performance of the cooling circuit increased significantly. With a mass flow rate of 2.5 kg/s, the total pressure drop is 3.1 bar, and the peak temperatures on the FS and HB are 500 °C and 261 °C, respectively. Besides, no cavitation is found in the total cooling circuit.