The importance of energy production through fusion processes is recognized by the entire scientific community. To effectively achieve this goal, new knowledge in the fields of plasma physics and materials science, as well as several engineering issues, are required. One of these concerns is the evolution over time of plasma-facing materials (PFM), in terms of erosion and maintainability of physical characteristics.

Within this framework our research activity took place. Through the collaboration of renowned institutions, mainly the CNR and the University of Catania, and with the Eni contribution, we started our research project regarding the interaction between plasma and first wall materials and the evolution of the PFMs.

Today we will present our activity which regards models and tools production for the aging of PFMs. We discuss our approach, defined as “multiscale”, and the main feature of the first two codes we prepared during the last two years of work at the IMM.

A plasma scale continuum global model and a feature scale particle-like Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) have been, in fact, coupled bringing as to the quasi-atomic description of the time evolution of a tungsten wall in contact with a fusion plasma.

Lattice references, initial energy, and stoichiometry distribution strongly determine the aging of the facing materials. In these conditions, our theorical model, which is able to adapt to experimental setup through database calibration, has shown the complex nature of the PFMs evolution which will be discussed together with our first results.