Low-Order Bessel-Type PID Dynamics in Lithium-Based Tritium Breeding and Heat-Removal Systems

Abstract

Lithium plays a dual role in deuterium-tritium fusion systems by enabling tritium breeding in blankets and providing an efficient heat-removal medium in liquid-metal components. Here, we combine nuclear data for deuterium-tritium and lithium reactions with a reduced thermohydraulic model of a liquid lithium jet and an operator-theoretic formulation of feedback control. We derive a low-order model for jet thermal expansion under deuteron-beam loading and show that a continuous-time proportional-integral-derivative controller, written in operator form, can be locally embedded in a family of Bessel-type differential operators acting on the tritium-inventory error. The results suggest that lithium-based breeding and heat-removal systems admit low-order, proportional-integral-derivative controllable dynamics that can be interpreted in terms of localized Bessel modes, providing a compact analytical framework for guiding future controller design and blanket/jet optimization.