Manufacturing and testing of ITER-like divertor plasma facing mock-ups for DEMO

Abstract

One of the most critical parts of a high heat flux plasma facing component of a Tokamak divertor is the armour to heat sink joint. R&D activity has been launched in the frame of the EUROFUSION Power Plant Physics & Technology programme and in particular in the Divertor project area in order to investigate the possibility of using the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) design and fabrication technology in an EU-DEMO tokamak.ENEA is being involved in the R&D ITER activities since several years developing suitable joining technologies for divertor plasma facing components fabrication. In fact, Hot Radial Pressing technique was used for the manufacturing of several small and medium scale prototypes that have been successfully tested by e-beam thermal fatigue testing.A new furnace was designed and installed at ENEA labs with the objective to extend the Hot Radial Pressing (HRP) manufacturing technology to EU-DEMO relevant divertor plasma facing components. This new furnace uses the pipe heat sink of these components as heater, speeding up the heating phase and allowing a better control of the pipe temperature. Considering that in EU-DEMO the thermo-hydraulic operative conditions of these components are different from ITER a FEA parametric optimization was performed and the geometry of the small mock-up to be manufactured was defined accordingly. The six manufactured mock-ups were examined by Ultrasonic and SATIR non-destructive examination methods in order to check the quality of the joining before their delivering to the high heat flux tests facility GLADIS for the thermal fatigue testing at high heat flux.