• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.2966-2976
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• 2023

A tritium breeder is a lithium-based material capable of producing tritium. Many researchers designing nuclear-fusion energy are studying tritium production using pebbles, which are solid-type breeders. The sphericity and size of the pebbles are critical in obtaining pebbles with good tritium-breeding efficiency. Furthermore, tritium-release efficiency can be increased by using pebbles with appropriate porosities. Promising raw materials for tritium-breeding materials include Li₄SiO₄ and Li₂TiO₃. Li₄SiO₄ has a higher lithium density than Li₂TiO₃ and exhibits excellent tritium-breeding efficiency. However, it has the disadvantage of being easily decomposed during the Li₄SiO₄-green-pebble sintering process because of its low structural stability at high temperatures and high lithium density. In this study, we attempted to determine the optimal conditions for manufacturing Li₄SiO₄ pebbles using the droplet-freeze-drying method. The optimal Li₄SiO₄ slurry conditions and sintering temperatures were determined. The optimal Li₄SiO₄ slurry-fabrication conditions were 3 wt% polyvinyl alcohol and 75 wt% Li₄SiO₄ based on the deionized-water weight content. The sintering temperature at which Li₄SiO₄ did not decompose and exhibited the optimum porosity of 10.8% was 900 ℃.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2174-2183
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• 2021

Helium cooled solid breeder blanket as an important blanket candidate of the Tokamak fusion reactor uses ceramic pebble bed for tritium breeding. Considering the poor effective thermal conductivity of the ceramic breeder pebble bed, thin structure of tritium breeder pebble bed is usually adopted in the blanket design. The container wall has a great influence on the thin pebble bed packing structure, especially for the assembly of mono-sized particles, and thin pebble bed will appear anisotropic effective thermal conductivity phenomenon. In this paper, thin ceramic pebble beds composed of 1 mm diameter Li₄SiO₄ particles are generated by the EDEM 2.7. The effective thermal conductivity of different thickness pebble beds in the three-dimensional directions are analyzed by three-dimensional thermal network method. It is observed that thin Li₄SiO₄ pebble bed showing anisotropic effective thermal conductivity under the practical design size. Normally, the effective thermal conductivity along the bed vertical direction is higher than the horizontal direction due to the gravity effect. As the thickness increases from 10 mm to 40 mm, the effective thermal conductivity of the pebble bed gradually increases.