Identification of blanket design points using an integrated multi-physics approach

The breeding blanket (BB) is one of the key components for a fusion reactor. It is expected to sustain and remove considerable heat loads due to the heat flux coming from the plasma and the nuclear power deposited by the fusion neutrons. In the design of the BB, the engineering requirements of nuclear, material and safety kind are involved. In the European DEMO project, several efforts are dedicated to the development of an integrated simulation-design tool able to perform a multi-physics analysis, allowing the characterisation of BB design points which are consistent from the neutronic, thermal-hydraulic and thermo-mechanical point of view. Furthermore, at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, within the framework of EUROfusion activities, a new research campaign has been launched to set-up such a coupling procedure. The first step starts with the definition of the reference geometry which is converted into a more suitable format for neutronic analysis with Monte Carlo codes. In the second step, the results referred to the calculated power density are properly imported and mapped into an analysis platform based on the Finite Element Method. The procedure has been successfully tested on a dedicated model (slice) of the helium cooled pebble bed blanket.