Experimental and numerical study of the pressure drop for ITER blanket shield block

The blanket shield block (SB) is located inside the ITER vacuum chamber, and the main function is to provide the thermal and nuclear shielding to the vacuum vessel and external components. The SB is foreseen to undergo a significant heat load which is a body load throughout the whole thickness of the SB under normal operation conditions. Therefore, the cooling configuration in SB should be designed very carefully based on the various experiences. The pressure drop in the cooling design is one of the most important factors to balance a water distribution of overall blanket cooling system. In order to verify the pressure drop characteristic and validate the design methodology of SB, experiment and numerical analysis are performed and compared their results. These results would be a benchmarking of the numerical results with experimental results to assess the gap between calculations and experiments. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.