Joining of HHF materials applying electroplating technology

• Electroplating of fillers is industrially relevant for brazing in fusion.
• Interlayers (Ni or Pd) improve adherence and reduce failure risks.
• Tungsten and Eurofer joints successfully fabricated by electroplating.
• Mechanical and non-destructive testing integrated into qualification.
• Shear strength of W joints comparable with conventionally brazed steel.

Tungsten will be used as armor material for blanket shielding and is designated as high heat flux material for divertors, beyond application of improved W composite alloys as structural material. Independent from design (water- or helium-cooled), a successful development is inherently correlated with joining of tungsten with functional components.Depending on the design variants, the fabricated joints have to guarantee specific functional or structural properties, e.g., good thermal conductivity or mechanical load transmission. Tungsten shows lacks in adapted joining due to its metallurgical behavior ranging from immiscibility over bad wetting to brittle intermetallic phase formation. Electroplating has shown to overcome such drawbacks and that homogeneous functional (e.g., Ni or Pd) and filler (e.g., Cu) layers can be deposited.In this paper the progress achieved in development of electroplating processes for joining W to W or steel to steel will be shown. The main focus will be the characterization of the processed joints applying metallurgical investigations including SEM/EDX analyses and non-destructive testing. The mechanical stability of the produced joints is demonstrated by presenting recent shear test data. The W–W joints failed due to cracking in W, whereas the steel–steel joints cracked in the brazing zone at about 200 N/mm2 load.