Conceptual design and comprehensive optimization analysis of a fusion-fission hybrid reactor water-cooled pressure tube blanket

Abstract Fusion-fission hybrid reactor is believed to be a feasible implementation of fusion energy in a short time as it requires less advanced technology in fusion physics and engineering than pure fusion reactor. In this paper, based on the mature technology of pressurized water reactor (PWR) and existing fusion reactor blanket concepts, a new conceptual design scheme of water-cooled pressure tube blanket was proposed for hybrid reactor and both the material selections and the structure design were performed. In the blanket, a trapezoidal U-shaped first wall (FW) was adopted to decrease the gaps between blanket modules. Due to high heat flux from plasma and intense irradiation by high-energy neutrons, it's essential to conduct thermal-mechanical coupling analyses and optimizations of the FW to ensure reasonable temperature and stress distributions on it. In this work, CFX-Workbench coupling method was adopted to perform the simulation. The influences of different FW geometrical configurations and boundary conditions on the temperature and stress distributions were researched in detail to optimize the FW structure. Besides, the thermal and mechanical characteristics of the helium tanks, the cooling channels and the breeding zones were researched in this paper. The calculation results verified the reasonability of the conceptual design scheme preliminarily and could provide a meaningful reference for the further conceptual design, analysis and optimization of the hybrid reactor blanket.

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