Cold Sprayed Tungsten Armor for Tokamak First Wall

Abstract

Owing to the COVID situation and transfer of manuscripts from ITSC 2020; this paper presents a shortened version of experiments and results that were recently published in a standard journal. For more details; please refer to the source [1]. Numerous obstacles are still to be resolved before power sources based on nuclear fusion could be employed. One of the major challenges are the materials used for construction of the main reactor vessels. In tokamaks; torus-shaped fusion facilities confining the hot plasma by strong magnetic fields; the innermost chambers are to be coated with dense coatings of W-based alloys. So far; the attempts for such coatings formation by other methods failed due to oxidation; high porosity; insufficient adhesion; high specific surface; or even insufficient thickness below 10 μm. Cold spraying seems a promising technology for the task. Here we demonstrate a successful fabrication of thick W; W-Cr and W-Cr-Ti coatings prepared without oxidation of the metals. For the first time in history; a deposition of 80 μm-thick coating of pure W was achieved.