Abstract
The materials plasma exposure experiment (MPEX) is a linear plasma divertor simulator currently undergoing conceptual design. The facility will expose material samples to steady-state plasma fluxes to examine plasma-material interactions (PMIs) that are expected in the next generation of fusion devices. The plasmas will be generated by a helicon source, with electron and ion heating sources of up to 800 kW possible. The peak heat fluxes of the target are expected to be up to 10 MW/m2. The facility will be capable of handling low-activation neutron-irradiated samples in order to examine the multivariate effects of neutron damage and plasma fluence. Neutron-irradiated samples are planned to be roughly of 10-mm diameter; however, plasma-facing components up to 60 \times 600 mm can be accommodated. The steady-state nature of the device will require the magnetic confinement of the plasma to be achieved with superconducting magnets, with a maximum on-axis field of 2.5 T. In addition, since MPEX will be a steady-state device, in-vessel components need to be water cooled. The primary in-vessel components will be the target, the dump plate, the limiter, the skimmers, and the microwave absorber. The conceptual design of these components is presented here, including analyses that confirm that the designs are adequate to meet the requirements of MPEX operation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8962193 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1446-1451 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2020 |
Funding
This manuscript has been authored in part by UTBattelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). Manuscript received June 27, 2019; revised October 25, 2019; accepted November 26, 2019. Date of publication January 17, 2020; date of current version June 10, 2020. This manuscript has been authored in part by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). The review of this article was arranged by Senior Editor G. H. Neilson. (Corresponding author: Arnold Lumsdaine.) The authors are with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831 USA (e-mail: [email protected]).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| US Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy |
Keywords
- High heat flux
- in-vessel components
- linear plasma facilities
- materials testing
- plasma-materials interaction (PMI)
