This Project Fusion LUTHYER intends to answer one of the key identified showstoppers related to liquid metals technologies in fusion – tritium management.
For that, the LNF has available facilities to succeed with the ambitious scientific program such as the PbLi circuit CLIPPER, already commissioned and in operation at LML.
CLIPPER is an experimental facility designed to provide a flexible operational scenario for the validation of tritium extraction techniques from PbLi. In particular, the Permeation Against Vacuum technology can be applied by means of tritium permeation through a membrane or by the direct exposition of the liquid metal to vacuum.
To accomplish with the main objective of this proposal – the validation of the PAV technique and comparison between both approaches – some specific objectives have been addressed, giving support to the experimental campaign. In is worth mentioning that the use of tritium is not allowed in almost any laboratory in Europe. Instead, the experimental approach is the use of hydrogen and/or deuterium, extrapolating the results to tritium thanks to the isotopes mass-relationship.
Fusion LUTHYER is organized in four blocks:
Objective 1 – Extraction of light ions from liquid metals
Objective 2 – Detection of light ions in liquid metals
Objective 3 – Modelling activities in support of the experiments
Objective 4 – Analytical activities in support of the experiments
Proyecto PID2022-140644OA-I00 financiado por MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 y por FEDER, UE
