Innovative heat shield against ultra-high plasma flux in tokamak divertors Project ID: TS01030051 Provider: Technological Agency of the Czech Republic Period: Jun 01, 2024 - May 31, 2028 Recipient - coordinator Institute of Plasma Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague Principal Investigator: Mgr. Jan Horáček, DSc. dr. és sc. Co-recepient(s) / PI(s): Czech Technical University in Prague -- Pavel Zácha Institute of Thermomechanics of the CAS, v. v. i. -- Jan Hrubý Co-investigators from IPP M. Janata, V. Sedmidubský, J. Horáček, S. Entler, M. Boušek, Z. Kutílek, J. Převrátil, L. Babka, M. Peterka, J. Klečka Aims of the project: The project goal is to optimize an innovative STEAM (Super-Thermal Exchange by Aqueous Medium) heat shield using water boiling in open microchannels. This type of shield is used to cool microchips, but a thermonuclear reactor requires much more intensive cooling. Although in current tokamaks the plasma load is below 10 MW/m2, in future reactors (STEP, SPARC, ITER, DTT) the load might exceed 100 MW/m2, as experimentally verified in the Alcator C-mod. An initial concept developed by us was successfully tested at 60 MW/m2. In this project, its experimental development will continue and CFD codes will be used to optimize it, allowing the process to be targeted appropriately and thus speeding up the overall development.