Pre-brazed casting and hot radial pressing: A reliable process for the manufacturing of CFC and W monoblock mock-ups

ENEA is involved in the European International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) R&D activities and, in particular, for the manufacturing of high heat flux plasma-facing components (HHFC), such as the divertor targets, the baffles and the limiters. During last years, ENEA has manufactured actively cooled mock-ups by using different technologies, namely brazing, diffusion bonding and hot isostatic pressing (HIPping). A new manufacturing process has been set up and tested. It was successfully applied for the manufacturing of W armoured monoblock mock-ups. This technique is the HRP (hot radial pressing) based on performing a radial diffusion bonding between the cooling tube and the armour tile by pressurizing only internal tube and by keeping the joining zone in vacuum at the required bonding temperature. The heating is obtained by a standard air furnace.The HRP technique is now used for the manufacturing of CFC armoured monoblock components. For this purpose, some issues have to be faced, like the low CFC tensile strength, the pure copper interlayer between the heat sink and the armour necessary to mitigate the stress at the joint interface, and the low wettability of the pure copper on the CFC matrix.This paper reports the research path followed to manufacture a medium scale vertical target CFC and W armoured mock-up by HRP. A casting of a soft copper interlayer between the tube and the tile was obtained by a new technique: the pre-brazed casting (PBC, ENEA patent).Some preliminary mock-ups with three NB31 CFC tiles were successfully manufactured and tested to thermal fatigue using electron beam facilities. They all reached at least 1000 cycles at 20 MW/m2 without suffering any damage.The manufactured medium scale vertical target mock-up is now under testing at the FE2000 (France) facility.These activities were performed in the frame of ITER-EFDA contracts.