FIREWALL: A surrogate model for the rapid assessment of tokamak wall loading and melting by runaway electrons
Abstract
Runaway electron (RE) beams generated during tokamak disruptions can deposit highly localized heat loads on plasma-facing components, posing a serious risk of melting and damage. Monte Carlo particle transport simulations coupled with three-dimensional thermomechanical response modeling can quantify this damage but are too computationally demanding for device-scale assessments and extensive scenario scans. We present FIREWALL (Fast Integrated Runaway Electron WALL loads), a surrogate model that combines a database of \textsc{Geant4} volumetric energy-deposition profiles with a one-dimensional heat-diffusion solver for each wall element. FIREWALL retains the energy and incident angle distributions of impacting REs and predicts the spatiotemporal temperature evolution of detailed three-dimensional wall geometries up to the melting threshold. FIREWALL thus provides a fast physics-based framework for translating global RE simulations into global wall melting predictions, enabling large-scale screening of disruption scenarios while directing high-fidelity costly workflows to the limited wall regions where they are actually required.
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BibTeX
@misc{svensson2026firewall,
title = {{FIREWALL: A surrogate model for the rapid assessment of tokamak wall loading and melting by runaway electrons}},
author = {Victor Johan Svensson and Tommaso Rizzi and Svetlana Ratynskaia and Hannes Bergström and Luca Venerando Greco and Matthias Hoelzl and Panagiotis Tolias},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.40132},
eprint = {2609.40132},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40132},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - FIREWALL: A surrogate model for the rapid assessment of tokamak wall loading and melting by runaway electrons
AU - Victor Johan Svensson
AU - Tommaso Rizzi
AU - Svetlana Ratynskaia
AU - Hannes Bergström
AU - Luca Venerando Greco
AU - Matthias Hoelzl
AU - Panagiotis Tolias
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.40132
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40132
AB - Runaway electron (RE) beams generated during tokamak disruptions can deposit highly localized heat loads on plasma-facing components, posing a serious risk of melting and damage. Monte Carlo particle transport simulations coupled with three-dimensional thermomechanical response modeling can quantify this damage but are too computationally demanding for device-scale assessments and extensive scenario scans. We present FIREWALL (Fast Integrated Runaway Electron WALL loads), a surrogate model that combines a database of \textsc{Geant4} volumetric energy-deposition profiles with a one-dimensional heat-diffusion solver for each wall element. FIREWALL retains the energy and incident angle distributions of impacting REs and predicts the spatiotemporal temperature evolution of detailed three-dimensional wall geometries up to the melting threshold. FIREWALL thus provides a fast physics-based framework for translating global RE simulations into global wall melting predictions, enabling large-scale screening of disruption scenarios while directing high-fidelity costly workflows to the limited wall regions where they are actually required.
ER -