3D thermal-hydraulic analysis of an ITER vacuum vessel regular Field Joint

The ITER vacuum vessel (VV), located inside the cryostat and housing the in-vessel components, is made of 9 40° sectors, connected through splice plates to form the full torus. The regions at the interface between adjacent sectors are the so-called Field Joints (FJs). While each sector has its own cooling loop to remove the heat deposition due to nuclear heating, each FJ is separately cooled. Individual inlet/outlet pipes for the water flow are thus provided for each FJ, located in the outboard bottom segment and on the upper port frame, respectively. The coolant flow splits in two streams, inboard and outboard, passing through the borated In-Wall Shielding (IWS). In this paper we present the 3D steady state thermal-hydraulic analysis of one so-called regular FJ (RFJ), at the interface between two VV regular sectors, using the commercial CFD software ANSYS-FLUENT®. The water flow field, the pressure drop, the temperature maps and the heat transfer coefficients are computed, and the effects of considering different levels of simplification of the IWS model, as well as the influence of buoyancy (natural convection), are discussed.