Renaissance Fusion
Renaissance Fusion is a Stellarator fusion reactor company based in Grenoble, France.
Why do you need a free-surface LM wall? Why not a more traditional channel flow inside solid walls?
“Plasma-facing liquids can handle neutrons and energetic charged particles better than solid walls. For instance, they suffer no structural damage by neutrons, because they have no crystal structure.”
View in the company profileWhat are the "universal benefits" of LM walls, including thin, static ones?
“Li-based liquid walls, even thin ones (< 1 mm), have benign erosion, sputtering and recycling properties. They basically act like sponges that absorb impurities and do not release them back in the plasma.”
View in the company profileWhat are the added benefits of thick LM walls?
“Sufficiently thick walls (35 cm, for our choice of materials) stop most neutrons. This serves two purposes: preventing neutron damage and activation of the rest of the reactor, including HTS, and harvesting fusion energy, 80% of which is indeed carried by neutrons. The remaining 20%, in the form of alpha particles, remains in the plasma and keeps it fusion-hot.”
View in the company profileWhat are the added benefits of flowing LM walls?
“Flowing walls exhaust the extreme heat and particle fluxes from the plasma, thus increasing the lifetime of plasma-facing components.”
View in the company profileDo you need high currents to levitate the liquid metals?
“No: thanks to the high magnetic field generated by HTS to confine the plasma, the Lorentz force on the liquid metal can easily exceed gravity, even for small currents applied.”
View in the company profile