Recent development toward the use of infrared thermography as a non destructive technique for defect detection in tungsten plasma facing components

For ITER divertor Plasma Facing Components (PFCs), tens of thousands of armor/heat sink interfaces will be produced by the industry. Statistically, there is a probability that interfaces with defects be delivered. The defect detection with Non Destructive Techniques (NDT) is then a major challenge. NDT should provide a detectability threshold below the critical defect size. For a defect located all along the axial length of a component, the critical defect size at interface is about 50 degrees for W monoblock (resp. 6 mm for W flat tile). It is defined with thermo-mechanical fatigue behaviour under 10 MW m(-2) for W monoblock (resp. 5 MW m(-2) for W flat tile). The purpose of this paper is to study the armor/heat sink defect detection of tungsten components (flat tile and monoblock geometries) with SATIR test bed (Infrared thermography NDT). We demonstrate that SATIR is a relevant NDT to detect defect of W components. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.