Experiments on FTU with an actively water cooled liquid lithium limiter

In order to prevent the overheating of the liquid Li surface and the consequent Li evaporation for T > 500°C, an advanced version of the liquid lithium limiter has been realized and installed on FTU. This new system, named Cooled Lithium Limiter (CLL), has been optimized to demonstrate the lithium limiter capability to sustain thermal loads as high as 10 MW/m2 with up to 5 s of plasma pulse duration. The CLL operates with an actively cooled system with water circulation at the temperature of about 200°C, for heating lithium up to the melting point and for the heat removal during the plasma discharges. To characterize CLL during discharges, a fast infrared camera and the spectroscopic signals from Li and D atom emission have been used. The experiments analyzed so far and simulated by ANSYS code, point out that heat loads as high as 2 MW/m2 for 1.5 s have been withstood without problems. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.