The UKAEA-led Lithium Breeding Tritium Innovation programme (LIBRTI) aims to de-risk fusion fuel-cycle technologies through the delivery of a test facility for component-scale modular tritium breeding experiments. Underpinning this effort is the delivery of a flexible and scalable digital platform, which will produce high-fidelity digital replicas of LIBRTIโs breeding experiments, and provide...
Complex multi-physics simulations are required to evaluate tritium transport in fusion breeding blanket concepts, since only such approaches can capture the coupled neutronics, thermo-fluids, and tritium transport phenomena and provide the quantitative results needed by system designers (eg. Tritium inventory, residence time, throughputโฆ). An integrated digital workflow has been developed for...
The Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulated Environment (MOOSE) is being developed by United States National Laboratories and partner institutions around the world to support multi-fidelity multi-physics modeling and simulation of advanced nuclear systems. Among its many physics modules, it offers computational fluid dynamics, thermal hydraulics, solid mechanics (including contact), and...
Achieving reliable tritium self-sufficiency remains one of the defining challenges for fusion power-plant design, making accurate tritium fuel cycle modelling essential.
At the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, we are developing a unified digital framework that connects material-scale physics, component-level behaviour, and system-level fuel-cycle performance, informed and validated by...
Currently, the LIBRTI experimental facility is being built in the UK to serve as a test environment for tritium breeder blanket systems of various types and to accelerate technology development for fusion reactors, such as STEP. In support of the LIBRTI programme, we have developed a multi-physics simulation platform for generic breeder systems, initially focussed on liquid lithium...
As the efforts to develop a fusion pilot plant progresses, there is a significant need for open-source computational fluid dynamics tools for studying component design of Fusion Energy Systems. Plasma Facing Components (PFCs) such as the divertor monoblock experience significant impinging heat fluxes on the order of 1-10 MW/m2 and neutron heating. These high heat fluxes are often exposed to...
The stellaratorโs steady-state capability offers inherent advantages for fusion power plants (FPP), including disruption-free operation and access to higher densities beyond the Greenwald density limit. However, reconciling particle exhaust and retention while fulfilling mandatory requirements of divertor life-time survival remains a critical challenge for reactor-relevant divertor operation...
The design of fusion energy devices poses great challenges to the neutronics modeling community. Fusion devices, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systemsโs (CFS) SPARC, are extremely complex devices characterized by a large number of components, streaming paths, and a spatially heterogeneous distribution of materials. In addition, the building that houses these fusion devices is characterized by...
Advanced computational tools play a crucial role in ensuring the rapid deployment of fusion energy systems due to the multiphysics interactions occurring at the component level. For example, plasma-facing components (PFCs), such as the divertor, undergo thermal loads and stresses, nuclear heating from neutrons and ions, and conjugate heat transfer in the solid material regions and...
Accurate predictions of neutron behavior are central to the design of fusion power plants, yet the confidence we can place in those predictions is often just as important as the nominal results. This talk will examine the landscape of uncertainty in high-fidelity Monte Carlo (MC) and deterministic radiation transport simulations and the steps being taken to bring rigorous uncertainty...
The ARC tokamak is a compact, high-field fusion pilot plant being designed by Commonwealth Fusion Systems to produce net electricity with high-temperature superconducting magnets. It uses a molten salt, FLiBe blanket for tritium breeding and heat removal in a simplified, high-performance design.
We present a multiphysics digital engineering workflow that integrates mesh-based Monte Carlo...
At Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), we are developing the SPARC fusion device, a high-field, compact tokamak designed to achieve net energy gain to demonstrate commercial viability of fusion energy [1]. Our fusion neutronics team is meeting the fast-paced needs of designers by executing compact, highly detailed neutronics models to influence the design of the SPARC device.
Our in-device...
A new thermo-hydraulic simulation tool, REIMS (Riemann Explicit Implicit Magnet Simulator), has recently been developed at ITER to model the behavior of superconducting magnet systems. REIMS can simulate normal operation scenarios as well as magnet cool-down, and work is underway to extend its capabilities to quench studies, with promising results for predicting stability and margin to quench....
Recent progress in the development of a virtual tokamak platform is presented, which aims to integrate physics simulations with engineering analyses for fusion R&D. The platform, named WILL (Versatile Virtual platform for Integrated fusion simuLation and anaLysis), provides such integration by flexibly and seamlessly bridging data from tokamak operations, experiments, and simulations. WILL...
Middleware is the connective layer that fuses data, models, and control across heterogeneous systems, enabling end-to-end workflows across a large number of systems. This talk compares the state of the art in middleware across three domains, large-scale experimental laser and MCF facilities, industrial manufacturing, and cloud platform, highlighting similarities and differences. We also...
Integrated modeling of fusion reactor design is essential for predicting self-consistent multi-physics loads (thermal, electromagnetic, plasma, neutron, etc.), assessing technical feasibility, quantifying uncertainties, and enabling design trade-off studies to de risk FPP concepts and guide meaningful validation experiments. The Fusion REactor Design and Assessment (FREDA) SciDAC project is...
Modeling and simulation plays a central role in fusion technology development - by allowing large parameter space exploration for design optimization, focused design of experiments and instrumentation, and safety analysis. This talk will provide an overview of the Cardinal multiphysics framework which integrates OpenMC, NekRS, and MOOSE for high-fidelity simulation. Several fusion-related...
Molten-salt-based breeder blankets for tritium breeding in fusion reactors offer distinct advantages by combining tritium breeding, heat removal, and tritium extraction within a single system. The successful design of these blankets relies on accurate characterization of key transport properties, especially the permeability of molten salts to hydrogen. The HYPERION experiment at MIT PSFC was...
The advancement of digital engineering workflows is critical to accelerating the design, validation, and deployment of next-generation fusion energy systems. In this context, we present the integration of a customized magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) modeling capability into a general-purpose computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework, enabling scalable, high-fidelity simulations of liquid metal...
Design optimization of stellarator blanket shapes is a high-dimensional, computationally expensive black box problem. Gradient-based optimization methods are well suited to find optimal solutions for this problem efficiently, when focusing on neutronic and basic economic metrics. However, due to the lack of spatial derivative information in the Monte Carlo radiation transport kernel, gradients...
Accurate simulations of the systems being designed and build by the fusion energy companies require consideration of the complex geometries of the system components. Tools being developed to support fusion energy system simulation workflows steps including (i) analysis geometry construction for general 3D configurations, (ii) fully automatic generation of well controlled meshes and adaptive...
As the push to deploy fusion energy systems continues through public and commercial initiatives, the determination of the design and accident scenarios figures of merit with the highest influence on design and safety is required. Current fusion energy system designs involve either solid or liquid blanket systems that serve the purpose of tritium (fuel) management, neutron multiplication, and...
