Demcon’s cooling system withstands the heat of a thousand suns

At the beginning of February, a 30-kilowatt beam of high-energy electrons was directed at a millimeter-sized piece of molybdenum in a facility in Dresden. That kind of abuse would normally evaporate the metal almost instantly, but it survived the bombardment for the better part of a week. The cooling system designed by Demcon has passed its first big test.

“To the best of our knowledge, never before has anyone even attempted to inject so much power per unit volume into a target continuously over days, while keeping it intact. For comparison, we deposit nine orders of magnitude higher power density in our target than is produced in the solar core,” says Bas Vet, senior mechatronic system engineer at Demcon.