Tungsten and CFC degradation under combined high cycle transient and steady state heat loads

ITER-W monoblocks under high pulse number transient heat loads at high temperature

“…Material performance was worse for the higher temperature, in accordance with former experiments with a different tungsten grade of the same purity at lower temperatures [8]. This can be explained by the general trend of lower yield strength of tungsten at higher temperatures [2,3], which leads to stronger plastic deformation due to the stresses induced by the thermal shock.…”

Liquid metals as a divertor plasma-facing material explored using the Pilot-PSI and Magnum-PSI linear devices

“…Such cyclical loading can give rise to both so-called macro-cracking [14] as well as microcracks at the surface [13,15,16]. The evidence so far shows a progressive degradation of the material may be expected under cyclical loading [15,17], and that over long periods and large cycle numbers even initially benign transient loading may lead to deterioration of the material [18,19]. This therefore implies that large cycle number loading such as ELMs may have to be entirely eliminated in DEMO, which has implications for operating in H-mode, or that improvements in PFCs, which could better tolerate transient loading, must be achieved.…”

Manufacturing of tungsten and tungsten composites for fusion application via different routes

“…Under such a harsh operational environment in the fusion reactor, intrinsic brittleness of W materials [9,10] may be easier to exhibit a series of brittle behaviors due to fusion particle bombardment [11][12][13], recrystallization at high temperature [14,15] or thermal shock loading [16]. To eliminate or alleviate the brittle behaviors and satisfy the fusion engineering application, an advanced W material is required and developed.…”