Recent US activities on advanced He-cooled W-alloy divertor concepts for fusion power plants

Abstract

Several advanced He-cooled W-alloy divertor concepts have been considered recently for power plant applications. They range in scale from a plate configuration with characteristic dimension of the order of 1 m, to the ARIES-CS T-tube configuration with characteristic dimension of the order of 10 cm, to the EU FZK finger concept with characteristic dimension of the order of 1.5 cm. The trend in moving to smaller-scale units is aimed at minimizing the thermal stress under a given heat load; however, this is done at the expense of increasing the number of units, with a corresponding impact on the reliability of the system. The possibility of optimizing the design by combining different configurations in an integrated design, based on the anticipated divertor heat flux profile, also has been proposed. Several heat transfer enhancement schemes have been considered in these designs, including slot jet, multi-hole jet, porous media and pin arrays. This paper summarizes recent US efforts in this area, including optimization and assessment of the different concepts under power plant conditions. Analytical and experimental studies of the concepts and cooling schemes are presented. Key issues are identified and discussed to help guide future R&D, including fabrication, joining, material behavior under the fusion environment and impact of design choice on reliability.