Vibration of fusion reactor components with magnetic damping

The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of the magnetic damping in the dynamic response of the main plasma facing components of fusion machines, under the strong Lorentz forces due to Vertical Displacement Events. The additional eddy currents due to the vibration of the conducting structures give rise to volume loads acting as damping forces, a kind of viscous damping, being these additional loads proportional to the vibration speed. This effect could play an important role when assessing, for instance, the inertial loads associated to VV movements in case of VDEs. In this paper, we present the results of a novel numerical formulation, in which the field equations are solved by adopting a very effective fully 3D integral formulation, not limited to the analysis of thin shell structures, as already successfully done in several approaches previously published.