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