Assessment of the relevancy of ENEA Water Loop facility with respect to ITER WCLL TBS Water Cooling System by considering their thermal-hydraulic performances

The Water-Cooled Lead-Lithium (WCLL) is one of the two candidate concepts for the Breeding Blanket (BB) of DEMO. A Test Blanket Module (TBM) together with its Water Cooling System (WCS) is going to be installed and tested in the ITER reactor. The WCS acts as primary cooling circuit of the TBM module, and it is designed to reproduce the water thermodynamic conditions expected at the DEMO BB inlet. During last years, ENEA and the DIAEE of Sapienza University of Rome have carried out the conceptualization of the Water Loop (WL) facility, belonging to the W-HYDRA experimental platform planned at C.R. Brasimone. The W-HYDRA platform is composed by three individual facilities called: Water Loop, Steam, and LIFUS5/Mod4. Water Loop replicates the salient thermal-hydraulic features of the ITER WCLL WCS, and it is equipped with a test section placed inside a Vacuum Vessel (VV) to investigate mock-ups of the whole TBM or its individual parts. This paper assesses the relevancy of the WL facility with respect to ITER WCLL TBM System comparing their thermal-hydraulic performances during selected operational and accidental conditions. Two RELAP5/Mod3.3 models were developed, and the outcomes of the simulations showed a good agreement, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of WL facility to support the ITER TBM program.