Thermal–hydraulic studies related to the design of LBE neutron spallation target for accelerator driven systems

Recently, studies have been taken up in world's leading nuclear research institutes to develop accelerator driven systems (ADS). Our department has earlier proposed a one-way coupled fast-thermal reactor of 750 MW (thermal). This reactor requires current in the range of 1–2 mA for proton beam of 1 GeV. A suitable liquid metal lead bismuth-eutectic (LBE) target based on buoyancy as well as gas driven method has been designed for this reactor earlier. In this paper, detailed thermal analysis in the spallation and window region has been carried out to study the operability of the target from thermo-mechanical point of view. FLUKA and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes have been used for this analysis. The results indicate that, the temperatures, thermo-mechanical stresses are within the required values. The detailed analysis of this work is presented in this paper.