Validating heat balance models for tungsten dust in cold dense plasmas

Abstract

The first comparison of dust radius and surface temperature estimates, obtained from spectroscopic measurements of thermal radiation, with simulations of dust heating and vaporization by the MIGRAINe dust dynamics code is reported. The measurements were performed during controlled tungsten dust injection experiments in the cold and dense plasmas of Pilot-PSI, reproducing ITER divertor conditions. The comparison has allowed us to single out the dominating role of the work function contribution to the dust heating budget. However, in the plasmas of interest, dust was found to enter the strong vaporization regime, in which its temperature is practically insensitive to plasma properties and the various uncertainties in modeling. This makes the dust temperature a poor figure of merit for model validation purposes. On the other hand, simple numerical scalings obtained from orbital-motion-limited estimates were found to be remarkably robust and sufficient to understand the main physics at play in such cold and dense plasmas.