Preliminary design and performance study of EAST liquid lithium limiter based on CPS

• Liquid lithium limiter will be applied in EAST tokamak to improve the plasma performance.
• CPS is used to prevent the liquid lithium from splashing under high EM forces.
• Active cooling water system is designed for high heat flux resistance.
• Good heating efficiency of the heat sink to the CPS is verified under bench test.

Lithium has the ability of H recycling suppression and impurities absorption and it can be used as plasma facing material (PFM) in tokamaks. Lithium conditioning experiments were launched on EAST, HT-7 and some other tokamaks for many years by using the methods of GDC, IRCF and evaporation. Liquid lithium has better performances in effective lifetime and heat removal aspects compared to non-liquid lithium. While, applying liquid lithium in the tokamak would cause the safety problem as the lithium can react with many substances violently and the magnetohydrodynamic behavior is difficult to be handled. EAST liquid lithium limiter (LLL) system is under developing and will be applied in EAST to study the main technologies of the liquid lithium application. The normal operation temperature of the limiter is expected as 230–550 °C under the active cooling of water. Capillary porous system (CPS) is used to prevent the lithium from splashing under large electromagnetic force by increasing the surface tension of the lithium. In order to investigate the cooling performance of the cooling design, the thermal-hydraulic analysis was done which shows that with 3 m/s flowing velocity, the water can keep the limiter under 550 °C all the time if the heat flux is lower than 0.7 MW/m2. Under heat flux of 1 MW/m2, the limiter should be retreated within 7 s to avoid erosion. The pressure drop of the coolant under 3 m/s is less than 40 kPa with temperature difference nearly 34 °C which meet the design requirements very well. The key manufacture process and technologies like vacuum bonding between the CuCrZr heat sink and 316L guide plate were well studied in the R&D process. The heating test on the test bench showed that the CPS can be heated efficiently by the heaters attached into the heat sink.