Cavitation damage in double-walled mercury target vessel

Naoe, Takashi   ; Wakui, Takashi  ; Kinoshita, Hidetaka   ; Kogawa, Hiroyuki  ; Haga, Katsuhiro  ; Harada, Masahide   ; Takada, Hiroshi   ; Futakawa, Masatoshi  

A mercury target vessel made of 316L SS is damaged due to the cavitation caused by the pressure waves in mercury. Cavitation damage reduces the structural integrity of the target front, called "beam window", being major factor to determine the lifetime of target vessel. Aiming at mitigating the cavitation damage by faster mercury flow in narrow channel, we employed a target vessel with a double-walled structure at the beam window along with a gas microbubbles injection. After operating the double-walled target vessel with a beam power of 300 to 500 kW, we cut out the beam window using an annular cutter to examine the damage inside it, and found that damages with maximum pit depth of approximately 25 m distributed in a belt on the specimen facing narrow channel. Furthermore, numerical simulation result showed that the distribution of negative pressure period from beam injection to 1 ms was correlated with the damage distribution in the narrow channel. It was suggested that the cavitation induced by relatively short negative pressure period contributed to the damage formation.