Design and cooling of the edge segments of the DEMO divertor target plates

In support of shadowing of the divertor target plate edges in toroidal direction against damage caused by the incident particles, the fingers at the boundary of the target plate should ideally form a flat surface. The reference cooling fingers are of hexagonal shape and when assembled together, their edge boundary cannot be flat. Therefore, the boundary segments need to be designed in a different way. Three possible designs are investigated: non-symmetric pentagonal fingers and two square-shaped fingers of different sizes, all cooled by the same type of concentric cartridge as in the reference design. Their heat transfer performance is analyzed from the point of view of maximum allowable temperature of the thimble structure. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is performed to obtain the minimum mass flow rate of the coolant which is necessary to keep the structure's temperature below the permissible limit at an acceptable pressure loss. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.