Thermo-mechanical calculations on operation temperature limits of tungsten as plasma facing material

Tungsten is a candidate material as a plasma facing material in the next step fusion devices. The material surface will be exposed to transient heat loads as well as steady-state heat loads. The present work describes the thermo-mechanical analysis of tungsten by finite element calculation. It is shown that tungsten has a strict operational temperature limit under transient heat loads. For the ITER-grade W, the operation limit of the base surface-temperature was calculated to be in a range of 400–780 °C under an applied transient heat load of 0.2 GW/m2 for 0.5 ms in order to avoid plastic deformation of W.