Preliminary thermomechanical assessment of the prototypical mock-up of the DEMO WCLL first wall to be tested in the Water Loop facility

The Water-thermalHYDRAulic (W-HYDRA) experimental platform, under construction at the ENEA Brasimone research centre, has the main goal of testing and validating the technologies to be adopted for the EU-DEMO Water Cooled Lead Lithium (WCLL) Breeding Blanket (BB) and its ancillary systems. One of the W-HYDRA facilities is the Water Loop (WL), a mid-scale facility capable of supplying water at Pressurized Water Reactor conditions to test the EU-DEMO BB mock-ups and ITER’s WCLL Test Blanket Module to carry out experimental activities aimed at validating numerical codes and safety procedures. In this framework, the present work deals with the preliminary study of the thermomechanical behaviour of a Prototypical Mock-Up (PMU) of the WCLL BB First Wall (FW), in sight of its design optimization and the related experimental campaigns in the WL facility. The assessment of the FW PMU’s structural performances was carried out, allowing the investigation of its global response under the load combinations foreseen for the tests and verifying the fulfilment of the RCC-MRx structural design rules. The thermal field adopted for the thermomechanical simulation was calculated by dedicated coupled fluid–structure Computational Fluid-Dynamic analysis and the FW PMU cooling performances were addressed as well. The work was carried out following a theoretical–numerical approach based on the finite volume method and on the finite element method, adopting the ANSYS CFX and ANSYS Mechanical commercial codes. This work presents and discusses the obtained results, along with models, loads and boundary conditions.