Investigation of various nozzles configurations with respect to IFMIF and liquid walls concepts

Abstract

The study of liquid-metal free surface flows is of great interest in the fusion research, for example in the IFMIF and liquid walls concepts. In the IFMIF project, the main goal is to test candidate metallic materials in irradiation conditions similar to those present in a fusion reactor. More specifically, an intense neutron source will be produced by bombarding a high-speed liquid lithium target jet with two deuterium beams of 40 MeV. The source will then be used to test samples of the candidate materials. In the so called "Liquid walls" project, the use of liquid film free surface flows as plasma facing components (PFCs) is studied as an alternative to metallic plasma facing materials. The free surface PFCs could result in important advantages over solid walls, such as the minimization of corrosion defects and faster maintenance. In both concepts the feeding of the liquid film will be achieved by the use of a nozzle. The main scope of this work is to focus on the optimization of the flow uniformity that comes out from the nozzle. According to the literature, the use of nozzles based on the Shima profile formulation has been favoured to improve the film stability. Based on the above, a number of flows springing from several variations of "Shima" type nozzles are numerically investigated here with main goal to define the most optimum geometry in terms of minimizing turbulent defects and flow deformations. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.