Recent results of high heat flux testing at the plasma materials test facility

High heat flux testing for the United States fusion power program is the primary mission of the Plasma Materials Test Facility (PMTF) located at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This facility, an official Department of Energy User Facility, has been in operation for over 15 years and has provided much of the high heat flux data used in the design and evaluation of plasma facing components for many of the world's magnetic fusion tokamak experiments. In addition to domestic tokamaks such as Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) at Princeton, the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics, and Alcator C-Mod at MIT, components for international experiments like TEXTOR, Tore-Supra, and JET also have been tested at the PMTF. High heat flux testing spans a wide spectrum including thermal shock tests on passively cooled materials, thermal response and thermal fatigue tests on actively cooled components, critical heat nux burnout tests, braze reliability tests, and safety related tests. The program's main focus now is on testing of beryllium and tungsten armor tiles bonded to divertor, limiter, and first wall components for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The ITER project is a collaboration among the US, EU, RF, and Japanese fusion programs. This article provides a brief overview of the high heat flux testing capabilities at the PMTF, and describes some recent test results.