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The thermal stability of dispersion-strengthened tungsten as plasma-facing materials: a short review

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Abstract

One key challenge for the development of fusion energy is plasma-facing materials. Tungsten-based materials are promising candidates for plasma-facing components (PFCs) in the magnetic confinement nuclear fusion reactors because of their high melt temperature, high-thermal conductivity, high-thermal load resistance, low tritium retention, and low sputtering yield. In fusion reactors, PFCs are exposed to high-thermal flux, because there are some transient events such as plasma disruptions, edge-localized modes, and vertical displacement events (VDEs). Especially, in VDEs, a heat flux of 10–100 MW m−2 with duration of milliseconds-to-several seconds can induce recrystallization and then change the microstructure of tungsten-based plasma-facing materials, leading to instability of microstructures. Then, a significant degradation of material properties is caused such as a reduction of mechanical strength and fracture toughness, a rise in the ductile-to-brittle-transition temperature well, and decrease of irradiation/high-thermal load resistance. Therefore, many efforts were devoted to improve the thermal stability of tungsten-based materials as high as possible, such as oxide dispersion strengthening, carbide dispersion strengthening, and K bubbles dispersion strengthening. Here, the thermal stabilities of various dispersion-strengthened tungsten materials are reviewed by evaluating their recrystallization temperature and the corresponding hardness evolutions. In addition, the possible development trends are proposed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51771184, 11735015, 11575241, 51801203 and 11575231), the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province (Grant No. 1808085QE132) and the Open Project of State Key Laboratory of Environment Friendly Energy Materials(Grant No. 18kfhg02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, GuangZhou University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Tao Zhang

  2. Institute of Solid State Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, 230031, China

    Zhuoming Xie, Junfeng Yang, Ting Hao & Changsong Liu

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Zhang, T., Xie, Z., Yang, J. et al. The thermal stability of dispersion-strengthened tungsten as plasma-facing materials: a short review. Tungsten 1, 187–197 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42864-019-00022-9

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