Thermal-Hydraulics Aspects of the IFMIF Neutron Source

In the last years an increasing interest was devoted to the development of facilities for testing the materials to be used in fusion reactors, such as the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility (IFMIF), a project developed in the frame of a collaboration among United States, Japan, European Union and Russia. This work was performed in the frame of the IFMIF project and is concerned with the thermal-hydraulic design of the liquid Lithium Jet constituting the Target of the IFMIF machine.The problem is constituted by the determination of the 3D velocity, pressure and temperature distribution in a turbulent, developing, curved, asymmetric jet with strong non-uniform internal heating. In order to face such problem, it was developed an ad hoc computer code, the RIGEL code (from the italian words RIproduzione di un GEtto di Litio, Reproduction of a Lithium Jet). RIGEL is a design purpose model, as simplified as possible but taking into account all the liquid metal jet relevant phenomena.The paper deals with the description of the IFMIF Target, with the fundamentals of the RIGEL code and with the main results of the design thermal hydraulic analyses performed in ENEA in the frame of the IFMIF Conceptual Design Activity.