Manufacturing experiment on a cooling plate for a blanket breeder unit

Plates with curved cooling channels will be used as Structural elements in a breeding blanket of a future fusion power plant. Such power plants are a promising attempt for future electrical energy production. The central Manufacturing process of such cooling plates is a diffusion welding process. Such a process has been "available" on a laboratory scale for years. But this diffusion welding process his not yet been applied on an industrial scale, This contribution documents our first attempt to transfer this to industry, a so-called uniaxial diffusion welding setup. The industrial transfer was attempted in two steps: (I) On a small cooling plate mock-up and (2) On a true-scale cooling plate. The problems with the technical transfer of the diffusion welding process from the laboratory scale to the true scale were Outlined. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.