An Application of a Higher Computational Efficiency Method in Thermo-Hydraulic Calculations of First Wall in Fusion Blanket

In the field of computer science, computational efficiency is an important indicator for measuring computational methods. The internal structure of the fusion reactor blanket is complex and has a large spatial scale, making the computational cost of the overall thermal-hydraulic calculation particularly large. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the computational efficiency. This article introduces a method to improve the computational efficiency of thermo-hydraulic calculations and presents a preliminary validation in the context of the first wall of a blanket. By contrasting different fitting methods for the thermophysical parameters of helium coolant in a helium-cooled solid breeder blanket, it is observed that utilizing a power function to fit helium density, with a similar fitting quality, leads to a certain degree of improvement in computational efficiency compared to commonly used multiple polynomial fitting, in the same order of magnitude. Subsequently, a method employing matrix correlation analysis for dimensionality reduction is proposed to increase the computational efficiency. Notably, there is a significant optimization in computational efficiency after applying dimensionality reduction. Furthermore, the proposed method is validated using User-Defined Functions (UDFs) within the commercial software FLUENT. Finally, by comparing the results of calculations using the power function density formula and matrix dimensionality reduction with theoretical hydraulic calculations, the optimized computational approach is found to yield reliable results.