Manufacturing experiment on a cooling plate for a blanket breeder unit

Plates with curved cooling channels will be used as structural elements in a breeding blanket of a future fusion power plant. Such power plants are a promising attempt for future electrical energy production. The central manufacturing process of such cooling plates is a diffusion welding process. Such a process has been “available” on a laboratory scale for years. But this diffusion welding process has not yet been applied on an industrial scale. This contribution documents our first attempt to transfer this to industry, a so-called uniaxial diffusion welding setup. The industrial transfer was attempted in two steps: (1) On a small cooling plate mock-up and (2) On a true-scale cooling plate. The problems with the technical transfer of the diffusion welding process from the laboratory scale to the true scale were outlined.