Hypothetical porous medium concept as a virtual swirl tape: A novel modelling technique towards efficient CFD simulation of swirl tape cooling pipe

Abstract

The EU-DEMO divertor target cooling circuit is equipped with Swirl Tape (ST) inserts to improve its thermo-hydraulic performance in terms of heat transfer coefficient and critical heat flux. Due to the presence of the STs, accurate 3D CFD-based thermofluid-dynamic assessments of the divertor targets cooling circuit require a high computational cost and a laborious pre-processing modelling effort. To this end, a cost-efficient CFD simulation technique based on an equivalent porous medium concept, namely the Virtual Swirl Tape (VST) approach, has been developed. In this work, the mathematical formulation of different VSTs models is presented, and the porous media calibration procedure and validation are shown. This technique enables the reduction of computational costs by decreasing the number of volumes required for a single Plasma-Facing Unit (PFU) assembly cooling channel by a factor of 10, while lowering the calculation time by ≈86%. The results obtained show that it is possible to correctly reproduce the friction factor profile and pressure drop of a PFU assembly cooling channel, this latter with errors within 10% considering a wide range of coolant inlet velocities. Some limitations have been observed concerning the VST thermal performance, which is still unsatisfactory and requires further development. The VST approach has been studied using the commercial CFD code ANSYS CFX, coupled with a multi-objective optimization algorithm available in the ANSYS Direct Optimization tool.