The purpose of this research was to extend the theoretical and experimental knowledge of runaway electron damage-impact-bombardment on plasma facing components and materials in magnetic fusion devices. The emphasis of this work involved computational modeling and experimental studies to investigate runaway electron energy deposition and thermal response in plasma facing materials. The goals were: 1) to develop a computational model to study and analyze runaway election damage, 2) to characterize runaway electron parameters, and 3) to perform experiments to analyze runaway electron damage. These goals were accomplished by first assembling the PTA code package. PTA is a unique application of PATRAN, the Integrated TIGER Series (ITS), and ABAQUS for modeling high energy electron impact on magnetic fusion materials and components. The PTA code package provides a three-dimensional, time dependent, computational code package which predicts material response from runaway bombardment under most runaway conditions (i.e., electron energy, incident angle, energy density, and deposition time). As part of this research, PTA was used to study energy deposition and material response in several design applications, to analyze damaged material, and to analyze several experiments. Runaway electron characterization was determined through parametric studies, analysis of damaged materials, and analysis of experimental results. Characterization provided information on electron energy, incident angle, current, deposition time, and volume of material impacted by runaway electrons. Finally an experiment was performed on the Advanced Toroidal Facility (ATF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study runaway electron damage. The experiment provided information on the runaway electron energy and current in ATF, as well as supplemented the existing experimental knowledge of runaway electron damage.
