Crush probability analysis of ceramic breeder pebble beds under mechanical stresses

A framework for analyzing crush events of individual ceramic pebbles in solid breeder blankets is developed by means of probabilistic methods. As a brittle material, ceramic breeder pebbles show considerable scatter in crush strengthen for single pebbles. The combination of the discrete element method and experimental data of crush loads provides the possibility of obtaining the overall crush probability of a pebble bed under compression. Furthermore, micro–macro relations are used to correlate the crush probability of pebbles with the overall stress level of the bed. Analysis of uniaxial compression of a mono-sized lithium-orthosilicate pebble bed is presented to demonstrate the application of this tool.