Hypothetical daily operation model of fuel cycle in tritium plant

•We introduced a mathematical model for the fuel cycle modeling of the tritium plant to minimize the tritium level.•We obtain the tritium working inventory level in the Isotope Separation System during 31 repeating burn and dwell cycles.•The model gives insights on both the burn and dwell hourly trends and daily trends of the tritium inventory level in the fuel cycle. This paper describes a design model for the fuel cycle of a tritium plant; the model considers both the fueling line and the Neutral Beam Injector line. The fuel cycle typically consists of a 16-h of burn-and-dwell operations followed by an 8-h silent shift, so the behavioral changes of fuel cycle of the tritium plant are influenced by both an hourly cycle of burn-and-dwell operations and 24-h cycle. To provide a tool to optimize the tritium inventory level, and to gain insight into the behavior changes of the fuel cycle, a mathematical model is developed. The model mainly focuses on the Isotope Separation System, which holds the largest amount of gaseous and liquid tritium. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear program model with linear constraints. An inductive operation scenario is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model. The obtained minimum tritium working inventory in ISS is 103.498 g in the inductive operation scenario.