The porous vanadium as a plasma facing material for the fusion devices

The purpose of this work is to investigate a possibility to use porous vanadium as components for the first wall of a tokamak-reactor which can accept the halo-currents generated during a disruption in a tokamak, Samples of pure porous vanadium were tested in pulse high current discharges in lithium plasmas, A total electric charge up to 1000 C flowed through the sample in the series of the discharges, The measured erosion was about of 3 x 10(-5) g/C when the sample was used as a cathode. Samples of pure porous vanadium were also tested in TEXTOR-94. This was inserted into a carbon test limiter. The test limiter was placed in the scrape-of-layer of the main toroidal ALT-II limiter. Vanadium, deuterium and carbon were measured spectroscopically. The estimated relative flux of the vanadium atoms to deuterium atoms drops from 3.8% to 0.4% with line average electron density increase from 2.5 x 10(19) to 6 x 10(19) m(-3). (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.