Manufacturing of small scale W monoblock mockups by hot radial pressing

Abstract

In the frame of the European Technology R&D programme for International thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) and in the area of high heat flux plasma facing components (HHFC), representative small-scale mock-ups were manufactured and tested to compare different concepts and joining technologies (i.e. active brazing, hot isostatic pressing (HIPping), diffusion bonding, etc.). On the basis of the results obtained by thermal fatigue tests, the monoblock concept resulted to be the most robust one, particularly when the HIPping manufacturing technology is used. Within this programme, ENEA developed an alternative technique for manufacturing plasma-facing components with a monoblock geometry of the ITER machine. The basic idea of this technique, named hot radial pressing (HRP), is to perform a radial diffusion bonding between the cooling tube and the armour tile by pressurising the internal tube only and by keeping the process parameters within the range in which the thermo-mechanical properties of the copper alloys are not yet degraded. The HRP is performed by a standard furnace, in which only a section of the canister is heated. The manufacturing procedure and the results of the screening and fatigue thermal tests performed on the ENEA mock-ups are reported in this paper.