Study on Transport Characteristics of Heavy Metal Granular Flow in Target Based on DEM

Based on the solid and liquid targets, many researchers have been devoted to a new conceptual granular target recently. With the impact of high-energy protons on the heavy targets in Accelerator Driven Sub-critical System (ADS), much energy will deposit in the targets, which needs to be removed efficiently. The intent of this paper was to simulate and analyze the thermal-hydraulic characteristics with much deposited energy. The spatial distribution of energy deposition was obtained through bombarding the tungsten target by proton beam with 450 MeV. Based on the coupled CFD-DEM method, the investigation into transport characteristics of granular targets with two different diameters was conducted under the calculated power density. The results indicate that the temperature in target distributes more uniformly with smaller diameter and the cooling performance of particles is enhanced as close to liquid target. In addition, the granular target can undertake higher power density and possess higher safety margin resulting from thermal stress confined within one tungsten sphere, which seems to have a good prospect for developments.