Abstract
This article presents an overview of ongoing research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on liquid metal (LM) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows under conditions relevant to fusion breeding/cooling applications, such as blankets and plasma-facing components for a future U.S. fusion pilot plant. The research is conducted within four fusion projects in which significant effort is taken to characterize closed and open-surface MHD flows of electrically conducting LM breeder/coolant (liquid lithium Li or eutectic lead-lithium PbLi alloy) and associated heat and mass transfer processes under various fusion reactor operation scenarios and conditions. This includes strong magnetic fields, stationary and transient plasmas, and high thermal loads. A special effort is dedicated to the development of a new experimental facility called Corrosion Upgraded PbLi Experiment (CoUPLE) and the associated experimental program for studying corrosion processes of structural and functional fusion materials in flowing PbLi, in a strong magnetic field.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Nuclear Science and Engineering |
| DOIs | |
| State | Accepted/In press - 2025 |
Funding
The work is performed under four ongoing projects at ORNL. Three of them are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725: (1) SciDAC project “Center for Simulation of Plasma–Liquid Metal Interactions in Plasma Facing Components and Breeding Blankets of a Fusion Power Reactor,” (2) “Liquid Metal Plasma Facing Component Development Program,” and (3) “Blanket and Tritium Fuel Cycle Program.” (4) “Design of a PbLi Corrosion Testing Loop and Experimental Planning” is the fourth project and is internally funded by ORNL, LOIS ID: 11420. The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting this paper for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this paper, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. The DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ).
Keywords
- Blanket
- corrosion
- divertor
- duct flow
- fusion
- liquid metal magnetohydrodynamics
- open-surface flow