Shelf life of plasma focus chambers with deuterium-tritium filling

Abstract

The paper presents the results of an experimental study of the shelf life of sealed plasma focus chambers with deuterium-tritium and deuterium fillings. Shelf life is defined as maintaining the level of neutron yield during operation of PF chambers as part of pulsed neutron generators after long storage intervals. The release of impurities from the inner surfaces of the PF chamber and the accumulation of he-lium He3 due to the decay of tritium in the volume of the sealed-off PF chambers leads to a significant decrease in the neutron radiation yield several years after the chamber is filled with the working mixture. The paper shows that the shelf life of the chambers is significantly increased when using a gas generator, in which hy-drogen isotopes are contained in a bound state, and are released into the inner volume of the chamber only for the duration of operation as part of neutron gen-erators. It has been shown experimentally that spherical chambers of the PF9 type provide a level of neutron radiation yield Y, close to the initial value in the manu-facture of chambers, after more than 10 years of storage.