An innovative approach to effective breeding blanket design for future fusion reactors

Abstract

An effective breeding blanket is critical to support tritium self-sufficiency for future fusion reactors. The difficulty is to achieve tritium breeding ratio (TBR) target of 1.05 or more. This paper presents a new design approach to the blanket design process. It indicates that fusion blanket design is affected by universal functions based on iterations. Three aspects are worth more attention from fusion engineers in the future. The first factor is that the iterations on the material fractions affect not only structure scheme but also TBR variation. The second factor is the cooling condition affecting final TBR due to the change of the structure material proportion. The third factor is temperature field related to the tritium release. In particular, it is suggested that the statistical calculation of effective TBR must be under reasonable control of the blanket temperature field. This approach is novel for blanket engineering in development of a fusion reactor.