A program to evaluate the erosion on the CFC tiles of the ITER divertor

Evaluation of the erosion on the CFC tiles of the ITER divertor by means of FE calculations

“…1. The used model for calculation is composed of one monoblock between two halfmonoblocks [4]. The calculations are performed by using a 2D CAST3M CEA code model [5].…”

“…The CAST3M calculations were undertaken mainly to crosscheck ANSYS calculations [4] using another methodology. The calculations are based on a series of steady states, the mesh being updated at each step of the iterations.…”

“…It was necessary to introduce 3 routines in the data language of CAST3M (GIBIANE): (i) EROSCC for the physical erosion due to carbon flux [10], (ii) SPUTDC for the physical and chemical [11] sputtering of carbon by deuterium and (iii) SUBC for the sublimation of carbon at high temperature [1][2][3][4]. Mainly chemical and physical erosions were validated against analytical equations and ANSYS calculations.…”

“…The problem of carbon erosion is a major concern [1] since one can expect the occurrence of erosion instability in normal operation. In particular, this could happen in case of one faulty monoblock besides good ones due to the balanced rate between the various erosion mechanisms at different temperatures (sublimation due to high temperature, chemical sputtering at low temperature) [2][3][4]. In order to evaluate the impact of these phenomena on the acceptance criteria of the monoblocks (the monoblocks are considered thermo-mechanically compliant to a defect of given size but this compliancy could be drastically reduced by erosion instability itself) it was decided to investigate the effect on temperature distribution and erosion rate of a 20% decrease of CFC thermal conductivity or a postulated defect at the CFC/Cu bond.…”

Modelling of steady state erosion of CFC actively water-cooled mock-up for the ITER divertor

“…Off-normal events and ELM's have not been taken into account. The calculations of the physical and chemical erosions have been done using the subroutine 'Erosion' developed inside a commercial and certificate finite element code ANSYS [4,5]. This subroutine includes physical sputtering, chemical erosion and sublimation of plasma-facing mock-ups under high heat and particle loads and allows to calculate temperature and erosion profiles for inclined particle incidence taking into account the shadowing effect.…”