Plasma-Wall interaction

Managing the loads and stresses acting on the wall in fusion plants, especially themigration of materials as a consequence of erosion processes and lifetime constraints affecting wall components, will be among the factors deciding on the feasibility of building a fusion power plant for permanent operation. Managing wall loads and stresses in ITER, which initially will be run only in the pulsed mode, is important especially in the interest of high availability of the experiment. The article describes the current state of research into plasma wall interactions and, in particular, the approaches to solutions and the strategies pursued in European fusion research to optimize the availability of ITER. This topic encompasses materials problems; erosion and transport processes in boundary plasma; tritium capture in deposited layers; and methods to control transient thermal loads.