The Blanket Design and Fusion Fuel Cycle (BDFC) Section is entrusted with carrying out indigenous research and development activities on nuclear design and optimization, and the outer fusion fuel cycle for their application in the Breeding Blanket System of nuclear fusion reactors. The relevant R&D activities to develop technologies associated with hydrogen isotope extraction, removal, recovery, purification, safe storage, and analytics of hydrogen isotope-related ancillary systems of the fusion blanket are being actively pursued at IPR.
Major Research & Development Activities
The research and development activities undertaken by the BDFC Section are as follows:
- Nuclear Design and Optimization of the Breeding Blanket for Indian fusion reactors.
- Nuclear design, activation analyses, radiation damage, dose rate, and radioactive waste assessment of the Test Blanket Module (TBM) System in ITER.
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Technology development for Q2O and Q2 processing in Helium Gas and Q2 storage (Lab Scale Level):
- Atmospheric Molecular Sieve Bed (AMSB)
- Reduced Metal Bed (RMB)
- Cryogenic Molecular Sieve Bed (CMSB)
- Hot Metal Bed (HMB)
- Getter Bed
- Development of coating technology: Dip coating and Magnetron sputtering.
- Hydrogen isotope permeation experiments: Structural materials.
- Development of Hydrogen Isotope Extraction System (HIES) for liquid PbLi.
- Multi-scale modelling of adsorption/absorption processes for AMSB, CMSB, and getter beds; development of numerical models to study hydrogen isotope permeation through structural materials; and hydrogen isotope release modelling from lithium ceramics.
- Design of an integrated loop for hydrogen isotope removal and recovery from helium purge gas and storage systems.
- Tritium residence time and inventory assessment in solid breeder blankets, and dynamic tritium inventory analysis in outer fuel cycle components of fusion reactors.
