Preliminary analysis of liquid LiPb MHD flow and pressure drop in DWT blanket of FDS-I

The dual-cooled waste transmutation (DWT) blanket of FDS-I (fusion-driven subcritical system) has been proposed to transmute long-lived nuclear waste, to breed nuclear fuels such as tritium and plutonium and to generate energy. The special magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) problems of liquid metal LiPb coolant in the DWT blanket are caused by the “banana shape” blanket module. The MHD effects of liquid metal LiPb fluid have been analysed and simulated by using computation fluid dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT added MHD user subroutine. The velocity profile and pressure distribution of LiPb flow in bend channels have been presented. The effect of wall conductance ratio of wall, including electrically insulting coating, electrically insulated flow channel insert (FCI) and electrically conducting wall, on flow velocity is analyzed.