Plasma Surface Interaction (PSI) studies at DIII-D

Understanding of Plasma Surface Interactions (PSI) and the selection of suitable plasma facing materials are critical areas for current tokamak experiments and future D-T burning facilities including ITER and FNSF. In support of PSI studies, DIII-D uses the Divertor Materials Evaluation System (DiMES), which contains a removable probe where material samples can be exposed to as few as a single well-characterized plasma shot. Experiments, consisting of a carbon DiMES probe surface with metal coatings of Be, W, V, Mo or Al, have been exposed to the DIII-D lower divertor strike point plasma for cumulative discharge times of 4-20s. Extensive DIII-D divertor diagnostics provided well-characterized plasmas for modeling efforts. Experimental results were benchmarked with modeling codes to validate and extend the predictive capability of the codes. Reported in this paper are two recent experiments and results. The first is on the net and gross erosion of Mo coatings and the extension of these results to an extrapolated all Mo surface DIII-D machine. The second is on the exposure to vertical displacement discharges and X-point plasma discharges of W-fuzz buttons, which were prepared by the PISCES (UCSD) laboratory. The surprising results are the robustness of the W-fuzz and that W impurity was not detected in the plasma core at the conditions studied.