학술논문

Sensitivity Analysis of Capital Cost of European DEMO Design
Document Type
Article
Source
IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science; November 2022, Vol. 50 Issue: 11 p4413-4418, 6p
Subject
Language
ISSN
00933813
Abstract
Conceptual designs for a European demonstration (EU-DEMO) power plant are based on extrapolations of physics scaling laws and current understanding of engineering limits based on available technologies. It is imperative to quantify the impact of uncertainties in physics and engineering parameters on the ability to produce an economically attractive future fusion power plant that meets key design outcomes. In this work, the sensitivity of the expected capital cost of an EU-DEMO power plant has been studied using the systems code PROCESS. A systems code aims to model interactions between subsystems of a fusion power plant and provide consistent solution across a large parameter space. The PROCESS system code allows for user-defined initial conditions and constraints and then optimizes using a given figure of merit to find optimal design parameters. We present a sensitivity analysis on optimizations around the 2018 pulsed EU-DEMO baseline, and this allows for the identification of the most consequential model parameters and the magnitude of the nonlinear interactions between them. We consider the pulsed EU-DEMO baseline, and while fixing the major radius and optimizing for fusion gain $Q$ , we present a sensitivity analysis of the role of the physics and engineering parameters and constraints in determining the capital cost of such a device. We identify the dominant physics parameter as the power threshold necessary to enter H-mode, which accounts for 45% of the sensitivity and find high interactions between plasma shaping parameters and other power plant subsystems. This analysis allows for the identification of areas of additional technical focus and uncertainty propagation.