The Development and Application of One Thermal–Hydraulic Program Based on ANSYS for Design of Ceramic Breeder Blanket of CFETR

Thermal–hydraulic design and analysis is an important step for blanket design to determine the temperature of the material, hydraulics parameter and radial building, especially in scope optimization phase. Traditionally, thermal–hydraulic calculation is a tedious work for designer while combining with neutronic design iteration calculation through ANSYS graphical user interface operation. One secondary development program was developed based on the commercial software ANSYS and characteristics of ceramic breeder layer-separated type blanket characteristics. When the material type, dimension and nuclear heat deposition of each layer along the blanket radial direction act as the input parameters, this program can automatically create geometric model, generate mesh, adding material properties, set boundary condition, calculate and post-process the calculation data according to user definition by calling the ICEM and Fluent software. Finally, the visual two-dimensional temperature field and the max temperature of each layer are obtained promptly. This could help easily to determine the thermal characteristics and hydraulics parameter of blanket and reduce the workload of the operators. In this paper, the programming methodology is reported and verified the reliability and efficiency of this program by employing one blanket design scheme for thermal–hydraulic calculation for Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor.