Progress status of the ITER Vacuum Vessel sectors manufacturing design thermal hydraulic performance

The present work exposes the 3D steady state thermal hydraulic (TH) analysis of the Irregular Sector number 3 (IrS#3) of the ITER Vacuum Vessel (VV), including the Irregular Field Joints (IrFJ) by means of a commercial CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code. The geometry of the IrS#3 has been simplified and healed in order to be suitable for CFD analysis. The simplified geometry has been meshed and converted to a polyhedral cell based mesh so as to enhance accuracy and calculation stability. Nuclear heat deposition (H) from the latest C Lite model [1] has been implemented through several User Defined Functions (UDF). Water coolant and stainless steel shell are solved together as a steady state conjugate heat transfer problem in order to assess the impact of the nuclear heat deposition on the IrS#3 cooling scheme. Hence, the IrS#3 is simulated as a whole, without splitting the domain. Results show the total IrS#3 pressure drop as well as the flow and temperature distribution all over the IrS#3. Moreover, the heat transfer coefficient (h) has been calculated at the fluid-solid interface. Velocity magnitude in the water coolant has an average value of 0.10 m/s and mass flow rate distribution is 11% and 89% respectively for Inboard and Outboard. The pressure drop, mainly concentrated at inlet and outlet ducts, is of 77.4 kPa. The average his of 5.690 W/(m(2)K), way above the design limit of 500 W/(m(2)K). The fluid temperature stays at an average value of 101.7 degrees C. The results obtained have a significant importance regarding design and safety and give a valuable insight on the current cooling scheme and system behavior for the IrS#3 of the ITER W. This follows a previous work presenting the methodology and the results of a 3D TH analysis of the Irregular Sector number 2 (IrS#2) of the ITER Vacuum Vessel (W) by means of CFD [2]. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.