E. Platacis

First Results of the Testing of the Liquid Gallium Jet Limiter Concept for ISTTOK

The use of liquid metals as plasma facing components in tokamaks has recently experienced a renewed interest stimulated by their advantages to the development of a fusion reactor. Liquid metals have been proposed to solve problems related to the erosion and neutronic activation of solid walls submitted to high power loads allowing an efficient heat exhaustion from fusion devices. Presently the most promising materials are Lithium and Gallium. ISTTOK, a small size tokamak, will be used to test the behavior of a liquid Gallium jet in the vacuum chamber and its influence on the plasma. This paper presents a description of the conceived setup as well as experimental results. The liquid Gallium jet is generated by hydrostatic pressure and injected in a radial position close to a moveable stainless steel limiter. Both the jet and the limiter positions are variable allowing for a controlled exposure of the liquid Gallium to the edge plasma. The main components of the Gallium loop are a MHD pump, the liquid metal...

Interaction of a Liquid Gallium Jet with ISTTOK Edge Plasmas

The use of liquid metals as plasma facing components in tokamaks has recently experienced a renewed interest stimulated by their advantages in the development of a fusion reactor. Liquid metals have been proposed to solve problems related to the erosion and neutronic activation of solid walls submitted to high power loads allowing an efficient heat exhaust from fusion devices. Presently the most promising candidate materials are lithium and gallium. However, lithium has a short liquid state range when compared, for example, with gallium that has essentially better thermal properties and lower vapor pressure. To explore further these properties, ISTTOK tokamak is being used to test the interaction of a free flying, fully formed liquid gallium jet with the plasma. The interacting, 2.3 mm diameter, jet is generated by hydrostatic pressure and has a 2.5 m/s flow velocity. The liquid metal injector has been build to allow the positioning of the jet inside the tokamak chamber, within a 13 mm range. This paper p...

Corrosion Phenomena of Eurofeer Steel in Pb-17Li Stationary Flow at Magnetic Field

Search of new energy sources draws the increasing attention to use for this purpose of reactors. In the Europe some years the program EUROATOM uniting scientific of the many countries for the decision of constructive problems at designing of fusion reactors operates. One of the main things in this program is the problem of liquid metals breeder blanket behaviour. Structural material of blanket should meet high requirements because of extreme operating conditions. Therefore the knowledge of the effect of metals flow velocity, temperatures and also a neutron irradiation and a magnetic field on the corrosion processes are necessary. At the moment the eutectic lead -lithium (Pb-17Li) is considered as the most suitable tritium breeder material [1–3]. In turn as a structural material have been tested both many austenitic and ferritic-martensitic steels [2–4]. As the optimum variant is considered steel EUROFER 97, which corrosion rate in liquid Pb-17Li eutectic is the least [3,4]. However, these results have been received without taking into account influence of a strong magnetic field. At the same time, this influence should be essential, as because of change of hydrodynamics of a liquid metal flow, and because of interaction of a magnetic field with a ferromagnetic steel. It has been shown in [5,6] that the magnetic field leads to increase of corrosion rate for austenitic (316L) and martensitic (1,4914) steels. Experimental data for EUROFER 97, and also a theoretical substantiation of the phenomenon are absent, that creates essential difficulties for forecasting working capacity of blanket construction. The aim of presented work were the theoretical and experimental investigations of magnetic field influence on the corrosion of EUROFER 97 steel exposed to flowing Pb-17 Li in specific designed loop.Copyright