Progress of the EU activities for the ITER Divertor Inner Vertical Target procurement

Abstract

F4E undertook the qualification of so-called “additional suppliers” in order to enhance competition among the potential bidders and to secure the procurement of the ITER Divertor Inner Vertical Target. In order to assess the performances of W armoured plasma facing components under the conditions expected in the divertor target strike point region, a total of 36 W monoblock mock-ups were manufactured by Atmostat (F) by diffusion bonding, and by CNIM (F) and Research Instruments GmbH (D) by brazing, from which fifteen mock-ups were High Heat Flux (HHF) tested at IDTF (Efremov Institute Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation) electron beam test facility.The basic HHF testing program foresaw the performance of 5000 cycles at 10 MW/m2and 300+700 cycles at 20 MW/m2. The test results showed some significant improvements, in particular on the issues of W monoblocks macro-cracking and heat sink thermo-mechanical fatigue performances, identified during previous HHF tests campaigns. Some enhanced HHF thermal fatigue testing and critical heat flux experiments were also performed.