Recent advances towards a lithium vapor box divertor

Fusion power plants are likely to require near complete detachment of the divertor plasma from the divertor target plates, in order to have both acceptable heat flux at the target to avoid prompt damage and also acceptable plasma temperature at the target surface, to minimize long-term erosion. However hydrogenic and impurity puffing experiments show that detached operation leads easily to x-point MARFEs, impure plasmas, degradation in confinement, and lower helium pressure at the exhaust. The concept of the Lithium Vapor Box Divertor is to use local evaporation and strong differential pumping through condensation to localize low-Z gas-phase material that absorbs the plasma heat flux and so achieve detachment while avoiding these difficulties. The vapor localization has been confirmed using preliminary Navier–Stokes calculations. We use ADAS calculations of εcool, the plasma energy lost per injected lithium atom, to estimate the lithium vapor pressure, and so temperature, required for detachment, taking into account power balance. We also develop a simple model of detachment to evaluate the required upstream density, based on further taking into account dynamic pressure balance. A remarkable general result is found, not just for lithium-vapor-induced detachment, that the upstream density divided by the Greenwald-limit density scales as nup/nGW ∝ (P5/8/B3/8) Tdet1/2/(εcool+γTdet), with no explicit size scaling. Tdet is the temperature just before strong pressure loss, assumed to be ∼ ½ of the ionization potential of the dominant recycling species, and γ is the sheath heat transmission factor

Design and experimental validation of looped-tube thermoacoustic engine

The aim of this paper is to present the design and experimental validation process for a thermoacoustic looped-tube engine. The design procedure consists of numerical modelling of the system using DELTA EC tool, Design Environment for Low-amplitude ThermoAcoustic Energy Conversion, in particular the effects of mean pressure and regenerator configuration on the pressure amplitude and acoustic power generated. This is followed by the construction of a practical engine system equipped with a ceramic regenerator — a substrate used in automotive catalytic converters with fine square channels. The preliminary testing results are obtained and compared with the simulations in detail. The measurement results agree very well on the qualitative level and are reasonably close in the quantitative sense