ECCOMAS 2024

Towards Efficient and Accurate Modelling of Inductionless MHD Flows in Breeding Blankets

  • Principe, Javier (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
  • Badia, Santiago (Monash University)
  • Manyer, Jordi (Monash University)
  • Roca, Fernando (National Fusion Laboratory, CIEMAT)
  • Verdugo, Francesc (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

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The breeding blanket (BB) is a key component of fusion reactors that bounds the plasma chamber providing radiation shielding, extracting heat and producing tritium. The computational modeling of BB requires the simulation of inductionless MHD flows. The most popular approach for the solution of this problem consists of reducing the set of equations by taking the divergence of the momentum and charge conservation equations to obtain Poisson equations for the pressure and the electric potential in combination with operator splitting techniques. Although the computational cost of each time step is greatly reduced, severe time step restrictions are introduced. Besides, charge conservation is not exact at the discrete level which pollutes the numerical solution and requires either some stabilization of divergence cleaning techniques. In this contribution we describe GridapMHD.jl, an open source implementation of the formulation proposed in [1], which follows a monolithic approach. The software is developed in the Julia programming language and exploits Gridap.jl [2], which provides an easy-to-use framework for the approximation of complex partial differential equations. The solution of the algebraic problem, performed by parallel iterative methods equipped with block preconditiners [3], is also addressed. Scalability results showing the potential of the model and validation against experimental results are also presented. [1] L. Li, M. Ni, and W. Zheng. A charge-conservative finite element method for inductionless MHD equations. Part I: Convergence. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 41(4):B796–B815, 2019. doi:10.1137/17m1160768. [2] L. Li, M. Ni, and W. Zheng. A charge-conservative finite element method for inductionless MHD equations. Part II: A Robust Solver. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 41(4):B816–B842, 2019. doi:10.1137/19M1260372. [3] S. Badia and F. Verdugo. Gridap: An extensible finite element toolbox in julia. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(52):2520, 2020. doi:10.21105/joss.02520.