Abstract
Unipolar arcing represents a plasma-surface interaction process leading to surface damage and metal impurity influx in tokamaks. It develops if the sheath potential formed in the plasma-surface contact is high enough to ignite and sustain a micro-arc. A laser-produced plasma was used for a comparison of the arc damage produced on stainless steel surfaces with that on surfaces protected with a coating of TiC a few microns thick. Smooth coatings of superior-quality TiC were produced by the activated reactive evaporation process, which is a plasma-assisted physical vapor deposition process. For a sufficiently high electron temperature in the laser-produced plasma a large number (about 300 000 cm −2) of unipolar arc craters were observed on the stainless steel surface which had been exposed to the expanding laser-produced plasma cloud for a few hundred nanoseconds. In comparison, no similar arc craters were detected on the surfaces protected by the TiC coating which showed minimum damage limited to the laser beam impact area.
Published Version
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