Thermal surrogate modelling for the monitoring of actively cooled first wall components in ITER
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: During ITER operation, Diagnostic First Walls (DFWs) will be exposed to intense radiative and nuclear heat loads, making active cooling mandatory. This work presents the adaptation of a mesoscale Porous-Media Approach (PMA) to the thermal modelling of actively cooled DFWs, aiming to support their quasi-real-time thermal monitoring. In this approach, the DFW is represented as an equivalent homogeneous medium, while the effects of the cooling network are incorporated through closure terms in the volume-averaged enthalpy transport equation. These terms are derived from coolant properties and cooling layout geometry. The resulting surrogate model is integrated into an end-to-end framework within the ITER Tokamak System Monitor (TSM). The PMA formulation is implemented in the FEM-meshfree MkniX solver to compute the slice-wise steady-state temperature solutions and a signed distance function-based 2D-to-3D linear interpolation strategy reconstructs the full 3D temperature field while capturing smooth geometrical transitions between adjacent reference planes. The method is demonstrated on plasma-facing components with complex cooling networks and evaluated quantitatively on one Equatorial Port Plug 12 DFW, where the surrogate model reproduces plasma-facing surface hot spots, far from apertures, within maximum relative errors of about 7% compared to CFX results. The 2D steady-state solutions converge in O(10 s) while the 3D interpolation takes less than a second. This seminal study supports the potential use of the MkniX-PMA approach for quasi-real-time temperature monitoring of ITER actively cooled first wall components.
Source: Frontiers in Physics
Institution: ITER
Language: English
Subfield: Materials Chemistry
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,077
OpenAlex ID: W7225399001