Preliminary research on flow rate and free surface of the accelerator driven subcritical system gravity-driven dense granular-flow target

A spallation target is one of the three core parts of the accelerator driven subcritical system (ADS), which has already been investigated for decades. Recently, a gravity-driven Dense Granular-flow Target (DGT) is proposed, which consists of a cylindrical hopper and an internal coaxial cylindrical beam pipe. The research on the flow rate and free surface are important for the design of the target whether in Heavy Liquid Metal (HLM) targets or the DGT. In this paper, the relations of flow rate and the geometry of the DGT are investigated. Simulations based on the discrete element method (DEM) implementing on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and experiments are both performed. It is found that the existence of an internal pipe doesn’t influence the flow rate when the distance from the bottom of the pipe to orifice is large enough even in a larger system. Meanwhile, snapshots of the free surface formed just below the beam pipe are given. It is observed that the free surface is stable over time. The entire research is meaningful for the design of DGT.