Abstract Describing the time evolution of Plasma Facing Materials (PFMs),
meaning quantitative evaluation of erosion, roughness, and physical properties
degradation, is one of the difficult challenges to reach the goal of efficient energy
production by nuclear fusion.
To follow all the aging-connected physical and chemical phenomena through
their characteristic dimensional scale, and to estimate the PFM microstructural
transformation over time, we propose a predictive sequential multiscale methodology,
consisting of two database-provided coupled codes. The first is a time-dependent,
volume-averaged, plasma simulator which describes completely this system, in terms of
thermodynamics, composition and evaluation of the sheath potential. Plasma solutions
are geometrically rearranged by adding surface reactions and 3D geometric features.
To increase sensitivity, plasma information is provided to the second code as an initial
condition. Such a code is a 3D kinetic Monte Carlo (3D-KMC) in-cell algorithm
for nanoscale erosion describing the PFM interactions through an extendable set of
physical phenomena, such as sticking, sputtering, ion enhanced removals and ion
penetration.
In this paper, we perform simulations for the case of study of Hydrogen (H) plasmas
produced in linear devices, reaching the quasi-atomic detail of the plasma induced
material modification of tungsten (W) as PFM.