Reported on October 26, North Carolina State University, in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has for the first time installed full-scale 3D-printed tungsten tiles onto a tokamak fusion device for live testing.
Tungsten tiles are core components of the tokamak divertor and first wall, required to withstand high heat flux and plasma bombardment. The team used electron beam melting (EBM) to overcome the difficulty of shaping tungsten at high temperatures; the tiles are full-scale and have undergone non-destructive testing. The live test will verify thermal fatigue and sputter resistance in a real plasma environment, providing data to support AM standards for plasma-facing components (PFCs).
Moving from lab-scale samples to device-level installation is a key step toward scalable manufacturing of refractory-metal AM parts. The results will inform reliability judgments for 3D-printed components in fusion and guide specifications for tungsten and tungsten-alloy powder supply.