Thermo-Mechanical Calculation on Pebble Bed Wall Interaction in Blanket Designs

Since the 1997 ENEA has launched two out-of-pile experimental activities related to the design of the EU-HT Breeding Blanket (BB) for ITER and the design of the Helium Cooled Pebble Bed Blanket (HCPB) and its Test Blanket Module (TMB) (to be tested in ITER) for DEMO. Both Breeding Blanket designs are characterised for having adopted similar Beryllium binary pebble bed arrangement as reference neutron multiplier material. On the contrary the breeder material and its arrangement in the Blanket module is different.The ENEA out-of-pile experiments have the main objective to investigate the thermo-mechanical behaviour of the blanket modules aiming at obtain the experimental confirmation that the basic lay-out of the module accommodates the Internal heat loads at the reference geometrical and thermal hydraulic boundary conditions.The tests will be carried-out at ENEA, Brasimone Labs in the THESIS apparatus of the CEF1-2 thermal-hydraulic facility and on the HE-FUS3 thermal-hydraulic facility.The paper presents both the designs of the experiments and the related mock-ups.The first thermal-hydraulic and thermo-mechanical calculations with a tentative to adopt a model to simulate pebble beds in a FEM code are also presented.