Thermo-mechanical study of high heat flux component mock-ups for ITER TBM

Commercial infrared heaters have been proposed to be used in the HELOKA facility under construction at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) to test a mock-up of the first wall (FW), called thermo-cycle mock-up (TCM) plate, under stress loading comparable to those experienced by the test blanket modules (TBMs) in ITER. Two related issues are analyzed in this paper, in relation to the ongoing European project aimed at the design of the two EU TBMs: (1) the possibility to reproduce, by means of those heaters, high heat flux loading conditions on the TCM plate similar to those expected on the ITER TBMs, and (2) the thermo-mechanical analysis of the TCM itself, in order to define a suitable choice of experimental parameters and mechanical constraints leading to a relevant stress condition. A suitable heater model is developed and validated against experimental data from an ad-hoc test campaign. A thermo-mechanical study of the TCM plate is presented, showing that the structure is able to withstand high thermal loads, even in the most constrained case, reaching stress levels comparable to the ITER TBM.