Runaway electron incidence on plasma facing components triggers explosive events that are accompanied by the expulsion of fast solid debris. Subsequent dust-wall high speed impacts constitute a mechanism of wall damage and dust destruction. Empirical damage laws that can be employed for erosion estimates are based on room-temperature impact experiments. We use light-gas gun shooting systems to accelerate solid tungsten dust to near-supersonic speeds towards bulk tungsten targets that are maintained at different temperatures. This concerns targets cooled down to −100°C with liquid nitrogen and targets resistively heated up to 400 °C. Post-mortem surface analysis reveals that the three erosion regimes (plastic deformation, bonding, partial disintegration) weakly depend on the target temperature within the investigated range. It is concluded that empirical damage laws based on room-temperature measurements can be safely employed for predictions.
© 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Nuclear Materials and Energy, Volume 41, 2024, 101735, ISSN 2352-1791
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nme.2024.101735
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352179124001583