Heat Transfer Experiment and Simulation of the Verification Facility for High Power Rotating Tritium Target System

High intensity D–T fusion neutron generator (HINEG) is important for research and development work of fusion reactors, of which the rotating target system is one of the key components. The design of the cooling technology principle verification facility both for tritium target systems of the 3 × 10¹³ and 10¹⁴ n/s HINEG was proposed. The facility employed the jet array cooling method. The first stage heat transfer experiment was carried out and the heat transfer processes was simulated by CFD method, which aimed at the investigations of the new cooling enhancement technology. The experimental results, which had a good agreement with the numerical simulation results, show that the maximum temperature of the target surface was about 89.4 °C under 60 kW heating condition and the average equivalent convection heat transfer coefficient of the jet array cooling was about 57,000 W/(m² K). All the results show that the verification facility could achieve the cooling requirement for 3 × 10¹³ n/s neutron yield (60 kW) design objective and the jet array cooling enhancement technology was effective.