Numerical simulation of draining and drying procedure for the ITER Generic Equatorial Port Plug cooling system

Highlights: • The cooling system of the ITER Generic Equatorial Port Plug (GEPP) is of a complicated combination of horizontal and vertical channels. • The calculation model for the entire GEPP cooling circuit comprising 12 sub-circuits and built up of 2421 finite-volume elements has been developed. • Transient analysis of this model simulating the draining procedure by the KORSAR/B1 code has been performed. • Water in amount of 263 g of initial 531 kg in the GEPP remains in the dead-ends of the DSM and DFW channels in 150 s of draining procedure. • Almost 3 h are required to boil off 263 g of water trapped in the dead-ends. - Abstract: For effective vacuum leak testing all cooling circuits serving the ITER vessel and in-vessel components shall be drained and dried so that after this procedure taking less than 100 h the purge gas passing through a component has water content less than 100 ppm. This process is four-stage, with the first stage using a short blast of compressed nitrogen to blow most of water in the coolant channels out of the circuit. This process is hindered by volumes which trap water due to gravity. To remove the trapped water, it is necessary, first, to heat up the structure by hot and compressed nitrogen, and then water is evaporated by depressurized nitrogen. The cooling system of the ITER Diagnostic Equatorial Port Plugs is of a complicated hydraulic configuration. The system branching might make difficult removal of water from the piping in the scheduled draining mode. The authors have proposed the KORSAR computation code to simulate draining of the GEPP cooling circuit. The numerical simulation performed has made it possible to describe the process dynamics during draining of the entire GEPP cooling circuit and to define the process time, amount and location of residual water and evolution of two-phase flow regime.