High heat flux testing impact on the Tore Supra toroidal pumped limiter achievement

摘要

The toroidal pumped limiter of Tore Supra is made of 576 elementary high heat flux (HHF) cooled plasma-facing components (PFC's) and designed to sustain 10 MW/m/sup 2/ in steady state. One of the main technical difficulties is to ensure a high quality of the bond between the carbon fiber composite armor tile and the water-cooled heat sink due to the high thermal stresses that develop at the bond during operation. Consequently, a HHF facility able to reproduce in service operation of PFC's is required all along the development and manufacturing route. In Europe, the FE200 facility (electron beam, 200 kW, France) operating since 1991, was extensively used for such a development. A first testing campaign in 1995 was devoted to the qualification of this bond: AMC/spl reg/ technology from Plansee GmbH was selected. Afterwards, a second campaign on scale-one elements (1996) allowed an optimization of the element design and series production to be launched. During the mass production, a non-destructive control process - cheaper and faster than HHF testing - based on infrared characterization was routinely operated on 100% of the manufactured elements. Strong variability of the bond quality was observed and a repair process allowing the replacement of deficient tiles was developed. In 2000 and 2001, 2 campaigns of HHF testing were launched to correlate the non-destructive measurements and to optimize and validate the repair process. This was done, in two steps, with success. This yielded moreover interesting information for qualifying both tests across each other and also to analyze the fatigue evolution of the bond. The qualification and the achievement of the Tore Supra limiter has greatly been made possible by such HHF tests, which appears as essential before and during PFC manufacturing.