Modeling Resilience of Fusion Blankets to Tokamak Disruptions

Fusion blankets must be designed to extract energy, breed tritium, and handle the high heat loads from the plasma in fusion energy reactors. However, all magnetic confinement concepts are prone to disruptions, where the current quench can induce currents in surrounding conductive structures, including the blanket. This work presents preliminary efforts to model disruptions in the Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT) reactor concept [1] with a dual-coolant lead-lithium (DCLL) blanket. We obtain estimates of the plasma equilibrium, first wall, blanket, and vacuum vessel positions using the code TokDesigner. These design features are then used in the extended-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code M3D-C1 [2] to simulate a disruption and provide a dynamic magnetic field throughout the reactor. M3D-C1 includes separate regions within the computational domain for solving different models. In the plasma region, extended-MHD is used, and in the first wall and DCLL blanket, which are modeled as electrically conducting solids, the resistive Faraday’s law is used. Additionally, we plan to explore different radial builds of the inboard and outboard blankets, including structural elements of SiC and RAFM steel and He cooling channels. We will also separately use anisotropic and isotropic resistivities to explore differences in isolated poloidal ducts and toroidally symmetric blanket configurations.

[1] R.J. Buttery et al., Nucl. Fusion 61, 046028 (2021)

[2] N.M. Ferraro et al., Phys. Plasmas 23, 056114 (2016)