Computational thermo-fluid exploratory design analysis for complex ITER first wall/shield components

Engineers in the ITER US Party Team used several computational fluid dynamics codes to evaluate design concepts for the ITER first wall panels and the neutron shield modules. The CFdesign code enabled them to perform design studies of modules 7 and 13 very efficiently. CFdesign provides a direct interface to the CAD program, CATIA v5. The geometry input and meshing are greatly simplified. CFdesign is a finite element code, rather than a finite volume code. Flow experiments and finite volume calculations from SC-Tetra, Fluent and CFD2000 verified the CFdesign results. Several new enhancements allow CFdesign to export temperatures, pressures and convective heat transfer coefficients to other finite element models for further analysis. For example, these loads and boundary conditions directly feed into codes such as ABAQUS to perform stress analysis. In this article, we review the use of 2- and 4-mm flow driver gaps in the shield modules and the use of 1-mm gaps along the tee-vane in the front water header to obtain a good flow distribution in both the first wall and shield modules for 7 and 13. Plasma heat flux as well as neutron heating derived from MCNP calculations is included in the first wall and shield module analyses. We reveal the non-uniformity of the convective heat transfer coefficient inside complex 3D geometries exposed to a one-sided heat flux and non-uniform volumetric heating. Most models consisted of 3–4 million tetrahedron elements. We obtained temperature and velocity distributions, as well as pressure drop information, for models of nearly exact geometry compared to the CATIA fabrication models. We also describe the coupling to thermal stress analysis in ABAQUS. The results presented provide confidence that the preliminary design of these plasma facing components will meet ITER requirements.