Plasma-wall interactions

Introduction

• The physics of plasma-wall interactions constitutes both a crucial problem of nuclear fusion experiments and a strongly inter-disciplinary topic of current research
• In present and future fusion experiments difficult tasks have to be solved in this field including:
• Control and minimization of the peak heat loads on plasma facing components
• Control of wall erosion by plasma particle fluxes hitting the wall
• Control of the impurity content of the main plasma due to eroded wall material
• Control of the formation and migration of hydro-carbon material trapping tritium atoms
• Relevant methodological areas cover plasma physics, fluid dynamics, transport theory, thermal and mechanical engineering, material science and technology, surface physics, atomic and molecular physics.
• Besides fusion applications, problems of similar nature also appear in, e.g., low-temperature industrial plasma devices.

Group interests [References to the list of publications]

The Fusion Engineering Research Group has a long standing tradition in some areas of plasma-wall interactions, including:

· Modeling of edge plasma and plasma wall interactions, in collaboration with some of the major European laboratories (JET, IPP Garching, ENEA Frascati, …) [J78, CP21, CP26, CP27, CP31]

· Development of dedicated computational tools for the analysis of plasma wall interaction problems, including finite element (FE) and control volume finite element (CVFE) codes, [J7, J8, J10, J13, J18, C11, J21, J35, J51, J70]

· Development of a self-consistent (edge/core) model of a limiter plasma containing impurities, its validation against both poloidal and toroidal limiter data from FT and FTU machines, and its application to the Ignitor design [J3, J6, J9, J15, J25, C8, C14]

Perspective

• Collaboration with the ITER International Organization on the analysis of selected plasma-wall interactions problems
• Training of students in the field of plasma-wall interactions through MSc and PhD theses