Speaker
Description
The development of a solution for the removal of heat and particles from the reactor is a key area of present-day fusion research as it determines the performance, lifetime and safety of future fusion power plants. The linear plasma facility Magnum-PSI is capable of exposing materials to steady-state plasma conditions similar to those foreseen in ITER and DEMO. In addition, the machine is capable of reproducing the transient heat and particle loads, with powers up to 1 GWm-2, as they occur during so-called Edge Localized Modes (ELM). This combined plasma and heat loading can be used to study the synergistic damaging effects on a target material. As such, Magnum-PSI is recognized as a key machine to predict plasma facing component (PFC) performance at high particle fluence (> 10^27 D+m-2) and high number of thermal cycles (>10^6 ELM-like events) in the European fusion roadmap [1].
Recently extremely high fluences over 10^29 D+m-2 have been achieved with steady-state power densities over 10 MWm-2. By virtue of the superconducting magnet, fluences over 10^30 D+m-2 are possible within a reasonable time frame, enabling the first lifetime studies of fusion materials in a lab environment. Furthermore, results on high heat load testing of tungsten based divertor plasma facing materials (including hydrogen isotope retention by means of in situ ion beam analysis) and high heat flux components based on liquid metals (including the effect of vapour shielding as protection against transient heat loads) will be presented.
[1] S. Brezinsek et al., Nucl. Fusion, vol. 57, no. 11, 116041, Nov. 2017.
