The absorption of deuterium by carbon-based facing materials on components in contact with the plasma in a thermonuclear reactor

Abstract

The conditions have been proposed for performing modeling experiments making it possible to predict the accumulation of hydrogen isotopes in carbon materials which are in contact with a tokamak plasma acting as a source of particles having a flux density of between 3×1016 and 3×1019 cm−2·sec−1. By analyzing the reemission fluxes formed in the stopping zone of the particles implanted from the plasma it is suggested that the action of the plasma as regards the sorption of hydrogen is identical to that of annealing the material in an atmosphere of hydrogen isotopes at a pressure of 1–103 Pa and a temperature of 1200–1700 K. The quantity of absorbed deuterium in POCO, UAM, RGT-B, and USB increases as the temperature is lowered and the pressure is raised (1500 K, 0.66 Pa→1200 K, 133 Pa). As regards their sorption of deuterium, POCO, UAM, and RGT behave similarly. There is a tendency for the sorption capacity of materials doped with boron to be reduced. In a class of itself is the isotropic material USB, whose sorption capacity is a factor of 10–100 lower than that of undoped graphite. The introduction into these materials of radiation-induced defects (T=300 K) by means of ion irradiation in the range 0.1–1 dpa results in a continuous rise in the deuterium sorption capacity by a factor of 10–100 (up to 10−2 atomic fraction). The USB graphite demonstrates record low increments in the sorption capacity. In the fluence range identical to 1–10 dpa the sorption capacity of carbon materials for hydrogen is almost constant. The process of the sorption of hydrogen isotopes can be described as the filling of two ensembles of traps, deep traps which are difficult to access and readily accessible Langmuir traps. In the RGT-B materials containing 0.1% of boron, the traps introduced by irradiation with 300-keV neon ions vanish on annealing in a vacuum (T=1800 K, t=1 min).