Antonio Froio is associate professor of nuclear power plants at the Energy Department in Politecnico di Torino, Italy, since 2025. His main research activity is the development and application of models for the analysis of different subsystems for nuclear fusion reactors, with main focus on the breeding blanket and its auxiliaries. He is the main developer of the GETTHEM code for system-level thermal-hydraulic modelling of breeding blankets, and a contributor to the nemoFoam multiphysics solver.
He has authored or co-authored more than 40 papers on international journals concerning system-level and 3D CFD analysis of different fusion components, and multi-physics modelling of the Breeding Blanket. As part of the EUROfusion Work Package Design and other Work Packages, he is involved in the design and analysis of the EU DEMO in-vessel components and related auxiliary systems. In collaboration with the Italian National Nuclear Physics Institute, he is also working on the numerical modelling of laser-matter interaction for inertial confinement fusion applications.
Prof. Froio was awarded a EUROfusion Engineering Grant in 2018, as a thermal-hydraulic engineer in support of the EU DEMO Balance-of-Plant design.
Title of presentation: Open-Source Multiphysics Modelling of For Liquid Breeding Blankets: The Nemofoam Solver
Abstract:
One of the challenges for future fusion power plants is the demonstration of a closed fuel cycle, i.e. producing in-situ more tritium than needed to operate the machine. The component devoted to such aim is the Breeding Blanket (BB), which however is nonexistent in present day fusion experiments. Among the several options being considered for the design of a BB, liquid breeders are considered the most promising option, at least in the longer term. Possible liquid breeder materials are liquid metals (LM; e.g. molten PbLi eutectic) or molten salts (MS, e.g. LiF-BeF mixtures), which could serve simultaneously as a breeder, neutron multiplier, and coolant. The design and analyses of these systems is therefore a multiphysics problem, as neutronics, chemistry, thermal-hydraulics and structural mechanics are interlinked; additionally, the flow of LMs or MSs in a magnetic field is affected by magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), influencing the flow pattern, heat transfer, and tritium transport.
This work presents nemoFoam, an open-source solver developed within the OpenFOAM framework, which allows coupled neutronics and MHD simulations, to determine in a self-consistent manner the neutron and photon fluxes, the power deposition, the Tritium Breeding Ratio, and flow and temperature fields. Several dedicated models for MHD turbulence are developed and presented. The code development, verification and application is presented, together with the future perspectives.
