Additive Manufacture of Plasma Diagnostic Components Final Report Phase II

Abstract

There is now a well-established set of plasma diagnostics (see e.g. [3]), but these remain some of the most expensive assemblies in fusion systems since for every system they have to be custom built, and time for diagnostic development can pace the project. Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to decrease production cost and significantly lower design time of fusion diagnostic subsystems, which would realize significant cost reduction for standard diagnostics. In some cases, these basic components can be additively manufactured for less than 1/100th costs of conventional manufacturing.In our DOE Phase II SBIR, we examined the impact that AM can have on plasma diagnostic cost by taking 15 separate diagnostics through an engineering design using Conventional Manufacturing (CM) techniques, then optimizing the design to exploit the benefits of AM. The impact of AM techniques on cost is found to be in several areas. First, the cost of materials falls because AM parts can be manufactured with little to no waste, and engineered to use less material than CM. Next, the cost of fabrication falls for AM parts relative to CM since the fabrication time can be computed exactly, and often no post-processing is required for the part to be functional. We find that AM techniques are well suited for plasma diagnostics since typical diagnostic complexity comes at no additional cost. Cooling channels, for example, can be builtin to plasma-facing components at no extra cost. Fabrication costs associated with assembly are lower for AM parts because many components can be combined and printed as monoliths, thereby mitigating the need for alignment or calibration. Finally, the cost of engineering is impacted by exploiting AM design tools that allow standard components to be customized through web-interfaces. Furthermore, we find that concept design costs can be impacted by scripting interfaces for online engineering design tools.