The ITER tokamak is designed to produce fusion grade plasmas for durations of hundreds to thousands of seconds. These long durations require active cooling of the wall armour directly facing the plasma.
Such actively cooled plasma-facing components (PFCs) have strict limits on the surface heat flux densities in order to avoid critical heat fluxes at interfaces with the cooling channels. These flux densities are lower for the 700 m^2 of beryllium (Be) main chamber PFCs than for the tungsten divertor targets and must be carefully monitored from the beginning of ITER operations, when the Be panels will be used for plasma start-up. It is thus extremely important to provide assessments of likely heat loading and thermal transfer within the Be armour for incorporation into real time plasma control algorithms.
This thesis aims to make a contribution in this area by providing a plugin to the SMITER magnetic field line following code framework for finite element calculations in first wall panels subject to heat flux distributions on the front surface computed by SMITER. The primary output of this new module will be stationary surface temperature distributions allowing production of synthetic diagnostic signals for testing the response of ITER infra-red diagnostic systems and as input to control algorithms. Results from the interface developed in this work will be benchmarked against specific existing thermal calculations provided by the ITER organisation.
|