Thermal hydraulic analysis and control of the HELOKA water cooling system

Helium loop Karlsruhe (HELOKA) is a new test facility, in advanced status of design at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, which will be used to test the helium cooled pebble bed (HCPB) breeder blanket for ITER under realistic pressure, temperature and He flow conditions. A redundant water cooling system, built in the 1980s, with a nominal heat load of 7 MW, will be used to remove the heat from the He loop. The paper describes first the thermo-hydraulic analysis performed on the water cooling system and then new feedback and feed-forward control systems for the electric drivers, based on the actual heat load, to increase efficiency and save energy.