Surface damage of plasma-facing components under short pulse and intense high heat loading

Plasma facing components in future large tokamaks are expected to receive intense high heat fluxes of short pulse duration during the thermal quench phase of a plasma disruption. Such incident heat fluxes may exceed 100 GW/m² over 0.01-5 ms. Surface vaporization develops a vapor shield plasma that absorbs large fraction of the incoming energy. Disruption-like condition has been experimentally simulated using a plasma source that exposes material surfaces to high heat fluxes (primarily from a blackbody spectrum photons), up to 80 GW/m ² over 0.1 ms. Various material surfaces have been exposed to the plasma source to test their performance, erosion behavior and survivability