Health monitoring of Tore-Supra Toroidal Pump Limiter using Lock-in thermography

Lock-in thermography has been used to control plasma facing components in Tore-Supra (TS) fusion device, during maintenance shutdown. The aim was to perform an in-situ health monitoring of high heat flux components after several years of plasma campaigns with a Non-Destructive Examination (NDE) method, to evaluate the components damage rate. echnique has been tested successfully in laboratory conditions, and provides a qualitative method to detect major defects on refractory armour tile/heat sink interface. It has been finally applied in-situ on the whole TS Toroidal Pump Limiter (TPL). It appears that a few elementary tiles are potentially damaged, which represent less than 1/1000 of the surface. The paper presents the method of this original health monitoring, and discusses the experimental results.