Optimal design of divertor heat sink with different geometric configurations of sectorial extended surfaces

•Effect of design variables in enhancing heat removal potential with pumping power assessed.•The optimization objective is to minimize the thimble temperature.•Investigation of optimum design parameters for various Reynolds number.•Practicability of the optimum designs is verified through structural analysis.•Benchmark validation of divertor finger mock-up against in-house experiment and good agreement is achieved. Cooling of fusion reactor divertor by helium is widely accepted due to its chemical and neutronic inertness and superior safety aspect. However, its poor thermo physical characteristics need high pressure to remove large heat flux encountered in fusion power plant (DEMO). In the perspective of DEMO, it is desirable to explore efficient cooling technology for divertor that can handle high heat flux. Toward this, a novel sectorial extended surface (SES) was proposed by the authors Rimza et al. (2014) [2]. The present work focuses on design optimization of divertor finger mock-up with SES to enhance the thermal hydraulic performance. The maximum thimble temperature is considered as the vital design constraint. Various non-dimensional design variables, viz., relative pitch, thickness, jet diameter, the ratio of height of SES to jet diameter and circumferential position of the SES are considered for the present optimization study. The effects of design variables on thermal performance of the divertor are evaluated in the Reynolds number (Re) range of 7.5×104–1.2×105. The analysis reveals that, the heat transfer performance of divertor finger mock-up with SES is improved for two optimum designs having relative pitch and thickness of 0.30 and 0.56, respectively. Also, it is observed that finger mock-up heat sink with SES performs better, when the ratio of SES height to jet diameter, reduces to 0.75 at the cost of marginally higher pumping power. The effects of jet diameter and circumferential position of SES are found to be counterproductive toward the heat transfer performance. To understand the stress distribution in the optimized geometries, a combined computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and structural analysis has been carried out. It is found that deviation in peak stresses among various optimized geometries is not significant. The CFD model has been benchmarked against in-house experiments and good agreement is achieved.