a b s t r a c tThe EURISOL project, a multi-lateral initiative supported by the EU, aims to develop a facility to achieve high yields of isotopes in radioactive beams and extend the variety of these isotopes towards more exotic types.The neutron source at the heart of the projected facility is designed to generate isotopes by fissioning uranium carbide (UC) targets arranged around a 4 MW neutron source. For reasons of efficiency, it is essential that the neutron source be as compact as possible, to avoid losing neutrons by absorption whilst maximising the escaping neutron flux, thus increasing the number of fissions in the UC targets. The resulting configuration presents a challenge in terms of absorbing heat deposition rates of up to 8 kW/cm 3 in the neutron source; it has led to the selection of liquid metal for the target material. The current paper presents the design of a compact high-power liquid-metal neutron source comprising a specially optimised beam window concept. The design is based on two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulations for thermal hydraulics and hydraulic aspects, as well as finite-element method (FEM) for assessing thermomechanical stability. The resulting optimised design was validated by a dedicated hydraulic test under realistic flow conditions. A full-scale mock-up was built at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and was tested at the Institute of Physics of the University of Latvia (IPUL).

a b s t r a c tStructural-hydraulic tests of the European Isotope Separation On-Line (EURISOL) neutron converter target mock-up, named MErcury Target EXperiment 1 (METEX 1), have been conducted by Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI, Switzerland) in cooperation with Institute of Physics of the University of Latvia (IPUL, Latvia). PSI proceeded with extensive thermal-hydraulic and structural computational studies, followed by the target mock-up tests carried out on the mercury loop at IPUL.One of the main goals of the METEX 1 test is to investigate the hydraulic and structural behaviour of the EURISOL target mock-up for various inlet flow conditions (i.e. mass flow rates) and, in particular, for nominal operating flow rate and pressure in the system. The experimental results were analysed by advanced time-frequency methods such as Short-Time Fourier Transform in order to check the vibration characteristics of the mock-up and the resonance risk. The experimental results (obtained in METEX 1), which include inlet flow rate, pressure of the cover gas, total pressure loss, structural acceleration, sound and strain data, were jointly analysed together with numerical data obtained from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Experiments of flow-induced vibrations using a closely-packed triangular rods array with a pitch-to-diameter ratio of 1.1 in water cross-flow were carried out to analyse the detected effects of system parameters in the frequency domain and vibration amplitudes. Single flexibly mounted rod with two degrees of freedom at each end of it was located in the second or the fourth row in the bundle with 21 row. Influence of increasing/decreasing flow, the test rod mass and support stiffness changes were analysed. Reynolds number based on the freestream velocity and a rod diameter was up to 1.64•10 4. Accelerometers and laser sensors were used to measure the time-varying response of the test rod. FFT approach was adopted to reconstruct the displacements from accelerometer measurements. Experimental results show that the behaviour of the flexibly-mounted rod is dependent on the flow time-history. Dominant flow-dependent and flow-independent frequencies were observed in the frequency domain. Changes in the frequency spectrum introduced by the test rod mass and support stiffness were identified. Oscillation regime of the test rod when the state equilibrium position becomes unstable with the limited oscillations was detected. Metamodeling approach was applied to develop mathematical approximation using three parameters: flow rate, stiffness coefficient and frequency ratio. Good accordance has been found between the inverse model and laboratory experiments.

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