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Copper melting behavior at extreme temperatures could inform fusion materials
Using SLAC’s electron camera, researchers recorded timestamps of solid copper atoms (orange) as they melted (yellow) after being blasted with laser heat. This graphic shows how copper atoms changed over a period of several femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), notated here as fractions of a picosecond. Instead of the predicted collapse, the researchers saw a gradual melting. (Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced researchers have conducted experiments testing how copper melts under extreme conditions, such as those it might be exposed to in a fusion machine. The results, published in Nature Communications, found that a copper thin film was more resilient to melting than models had predicted, uncovering molecular dynamics that had been missing from calculations.
“These results greatly improve the simulations we use to predict which materials have the best shot at surviving the extreme conditions of future fusion reaction chambers,” said Mianzhen Mo, the SLAC staff scientist who led the research.
Yasuhiro Iwamura, Takehiko Itoh, Nobuaki Gotoh, Ichiro Toyoda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 33 | Number 4 | July 1998 | Pages 476-492
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST98-A47
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new type of experimental apparatus is developed to induce continuous diffusion of deuterium, in which an electrochemical cell for calorimetry and a vacuum chamber for nuclear measurement are divided by a Pd sheet. Continuous X rays ranging from 10 to 100 keV and neutron and excess heat production are observed using the apparatus. Titanium atoms are detected on the surface where deuterium atoms pass through on Pd cathodes after electrolysis. Quantitative discussion shows that the detected Ti atoms cannot be explained by contamination. An electron-induced nuclear reaction (EINR) model for explaining the obtained experimental results is introduced. Experimental support of the EINR model is demonstrated by using multilayer cathodes, in which a layer containing Ca is placed at the near surface of Pd, based on the EINR model.
