Fatigue life prediction of hypervapotron for CFETR divertor

•One optimized hypervapotron module with longitudinal and horizontal internal ribs was designed, and the rationality of the structure has been confirmed by some design criterions.•CuCrZr alloy channel was confirmed to experience plastic cycle and fatigue life prediction was calculated to be 1.249 year combining with CFETR operating conditions.•This paper provides a systematic method for fatigue life prediction and reliability analysis for hypervapotron of divertor. The engineering design of China Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR) will be finished in the end of this year. Compared with Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), this is a large development which means closer to commercial fusion reactors. The design objective of CFETR divertor requires a steady-state thermal load of 10–20MW/m2 exhaust. There are several design options for the CFETR divertor. Hypervapotron with its superior performance has been researched for several decades as one important candidate for future fusion device divertor. In this paper, a new design of hypervapotron plasma facing unit (PFU) was developed. Horizontal and longitudinal ribs were adopted to generate more vaporized cores to enhance heat transfer. Some optimizations were performed based on the allowable max heat flux (MAHF) to get the final design. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) boiling model of Eulerian Multiphase fluid and k-epsilon model of Viscous were chosen to deal with sub-cooled boiling. 3Sm rule and Bree-diagram was used to confirm the rationality of the structure after thermal-mechanical analysis. Numerical simulation results suggested that CuCrZr alloy will experience cyclic plastic strain. Based on this, fatigue life prediction of the hypervapotron PFU at a steady-state heat flux of 10MW/m2 were carried out through local stress-strain method, neuber curve and design fatigue life curve. Eventually, a fatigue life of approximately 1.2489 year was verified for CFETR divertor. This paper provides a systematic method for fatigue life prediction and reliability analysis of hypervapotron.