16
Development
of a Canonical Approach to Liquid Metal Magnetohydrodynamic Computations and
Experiments--HyPerComp,
Inc., 31255 Cedar Valley Drive, Suite 327, Westlake, CA
913627140; 818-865-3713, www.hypercomp.net
Dr. Ramakanth Munipalli, Principal Investigator, mrk@hypercomp.net
Dr.
Vijaya Shankar, Business Official,
DOE
Grant No. DE-FG02-04ER83977
Amount:
$100,000
The
use of liquid metals has been advanced for the removal of heat from first walls
in fusion energy systems. Because
the costs of actual fusion experiments are so prohibitive, simulations are
needed to predict the performance of these systems.
A pioneering liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code has already been
developed for liquid-metal heat transfer, and it has attracted significant
interest in the nuclear fusion community. This
project will incorporate a turbulence model in the code and initiate a series of
experimental and numerical unit test cases in order to validate the results.
The unit test cases will be used to isolate physical and numerical issues
that may be benchmarked in a code environment.
Phase I will add a
two-equation turbulence model to the code, identify a set of unit problems,
conduct numerical simulations, and design a set of experiments for testing the
results.
Commercial
Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:
Unlike other branches of Computational Fluid Dynamics, there is no
accepted series of test cases for liquid-metal MHD.
The results of this project should provide uniform acceptance of the
liquid-metal MHD code, and the turbulence modeling should generalize code usage.