Fusion News: Space Daily – Hot lithium vapors shield fusion facility walls
If confirmed by further research, this type of lithium treatment could alleviate widespread concerns that liquid-lithium plasma-facing components will rapidly overwhelm the core of the plasma with impurities and abort fusion reactions.Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and the Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER) conditioned the target samples with lithium and, in the course of experiments, raised the surface temperature above 900 degrees Celsius.At such high temperatures the lithium rapidly ablates, or wears away, from the target through a combination of evaporation and other erosion processes. The vaporized lithium is expected to serve as a shield that will intercept and mitigate the intense plasma flux before it can impinge upon the rest of the wall.These experiments demonstrated that such a vapor cloud could be produced and was stable over a wide temperature range. The research found that the regime persisted for three-to-four seconds under the intense plasma bombardment. This indicated that nearly 100 percent of any eroded wall material had been confined to the surface of the sample.
