EUROfusion Engineering Grant awarded to young E2M Scientist

Each year, EUROfusion awards a series of Researcher and Engineering grants to promising young scientists working on fusion research in Europe. E2M young scientists are no strangers to these grants, as was reported already in 2017 and 2018. This year, one such successful applicant is Rodrigo Arredondo, who applied to the topic of ‘Analysis of tritium inventory and permeation in DEMO plasma-facing components’.

Tritium self-sufficiency is a critical engineering challenge for future fusion power plants, requiring efficient breeding and extraction systems, as well as minimal tritium losses to the surrounding systems. Plasma-facing components act as a tritium sink, as tritium will be accumulated in the bulk of the components and could permeate into the coolant. Therefore, assessments of tritium retention and permeation in plasma-facing components are required for the plant-level engineering designs of the tritium breeding and safety systems.

During his 3-year task agreement with EUROfusion, Rodrigo Arredondo will study gas- and ion-driven permeation and retention of hydrogen isotopes in the first-wall of the planned future power plant DEMO. The goal of the project is to produce basic data for an accurate engineering assessment of the T inventory in the plasma-facing components of DEMO and the T losses through permeation under a reactor-relevant operating regime.

SIESTA was previously featured in an E2M highlight. A basic description of the experimental set-up and characterization of SIESTA was recently published in Review of Scientific Instruments:

R. Arredondo et al., “SIESTA: A High Current Ion Source for Erosion and Retention Studies”, Review of Scientific Instruments, 89, 103501 (10pp) (2018). https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5039156