Thermal hydraulic design of the mercury target vessel

Haga, Katsuhiro  ; Wakui, Takashi  ; Kogawa, Hiroyuki  ; Harada, Masahide   ; Futakawa, Masatoshi  ; Hayashi, Kenichi*; Nakamura, Koji*

JAEA has completed the mercury target system as the spallation neutron source of J-PARC project, which has the power of the world highest level of 1MW. The basic design of the flow channel and structure of the mercury target vessel was carried out by JAEA, and the detail design, parts fabrication and assembling has been carried out by the vendor from 2003. Taking these fabrication designs and assembling conditions into consideration, the final performance evaluation of the mercury target vessel was carried out in view of thermal hydraulics. The general thermal hydraulic analyses code, STAR-CD, was used, and the three dimensional thermal hydraulic analyses were carried out taking the nuclear heating and the heat transportation into consideration. As results, it was confirmed that the mercury target vessel fulfills the design requirements such as the fluid inlet velocity, the maximum temperature of fluid, the maximum temperature of the vessel, the pressure drop of fluid, etc.