Comparison of electron beam test facilities for testing of high heat flux components

In the last few years, electron beam facilities for the testing of high heat flux components have been erected in Europe, Japan, Russia and in the USA. In principle ail the facilities are comparable, but some machine parameters are quite different. These differences include electron beam operation (beam generation, beam diameter, sweeping mode), as well as the temperature measurement devices, calibration techniques and the definition of absorbed power densities. In order to assess the influence of these machine parameters and techniques on the results of high heat flux experiments, a round robin test has been performed in five facilities. In these tests, actively cooled CFC monoblock mock-ups were heated by electron beams using target power densities up to 15 MW/m(2). Mock-up temperatures and their distribution, measured by different methods (IR camera, pyrometer, thermocouples), have been used as criteria for comparison. The evaluation of data from the different facilities shows good agreement for identical target loading conditions. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.