Development of a Canonical Approach to Liquid Metal MHD Computations and Experiments

75909-The use of liquid metals has been advanced for the removal of heat from first walls in fusion energy systems. Because the costs of actual fusion experiments are so prohibitive, simulations are needed to predict the performance of these systems. A pioneering liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code has already been developed for liquid-metal heat transfer, and it has attracted significant interest in the nuclear fusion community. This project will incorporate a turbulence model in the code and initiate a series of experimental and numerical unit test cases in order to validate the results. The unit test cases will be used to isolate physical and numerical issues that may be benchmarked in a code environment. Phase I will add a two-equation turbulence model to the code, identify a set of unit problems, conduct numerical simulations, and design a set of experiments for testing the results. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: Unlike other branches of Computational Fluid Dynamics, there is no accepted series of test cases for liquid-metal MHD. The results of this project should provide uniform acceptance of the liquid-metal MHD code, and the turbulence modeling should generalize code usage.