Vapour shielding of liquid-metal CPS-based targets under ELM-like and disruption transient loading

This paper presents experimental studies of plasma-surface interactions during powerful plasma impacts of a Quasi-Stationary Plasma Accelerator (QSPA) on the Sn capillary porous systems (CPSs) in conditions, simulating disruption and Edge Localized Modes (ELM) like loads. Experiments were carried out using two QSPA devices. ELM-like plasma exposures were performed with QSPA-M test-bed facility. A large-scale QSPA Kh-50 device was used to simulate plasma disruptions and giant ELMs. Variation of the plasma stream energy density has been performed to study the onset of vapour shield. It is shown that during plasma exposures of a Sn-CPS target with the QSPA plasma load 0.5 MJ/m2, which corresponds to the strong vapour shielding of the exposed surface. A comparison between the obtained results on the vapour shielding of Sn CPS and available numerical simulation using the TOKES code has been performed.