Assessment of COMSOL capability to analyze thermal-hydraulic characteristics of Korean helium cooled test blanket

Highlights: ► Thermal-hydraulic analysis capability of the multi-physics code, COMSOL, was validated by the computational result of commercial CFD code, CFX-10. ► The design of the Korean helium cooled test blanket was selected as a reference model. ► Maximum deviation of peak temperature between two codes was below 1.5%. ► Although the COMSOL based on finite element method has a little numerical error in the fluid dynamic simulation, but the capability of COMSOL was acceptable generally. -- Abstract: Analyzing thermal hydraulic characteristics of the blanket is one of key factors for the blanket design. Since complicated phenomena in the blanket, especially a coupling effect between neutronics and heat transfers, make accurate analyses of the blanket very challenging. Therefore, advanced analysis method should be adopted to resolve the multi-physical problem. The present study uses COMSOL multi-physics code for thermal analyses of the blanket, since the COMSOL conceptually has sufficient capability of considering the heat transfer, neutronics, and even tritium behaviors together in a single code framework. As a part of this track, this study first validates the thermal-hydraulic analysis capability of the COMSOL by comparing with the CFD code, which can provide accurate thermal prediction for complicated single phase flow problems. This study selects KO HCML TBM as the reference blanket design for the validation because the detailed TBM design and preliminary analysis are available. Peak temperatures at the top and bottom region of TBM by COMSOL were 897.49 K and 882.69 K, respectively. The maximum deviation of peak temperature to the CFD result was below 1.5%. And the temperature distributions of two codes were overall similar to each other. Therefore, it is concluded that the COMSOL has an acceptable thermal-hydraulic analysis capability