Influence of Impurities on the Fuel Retention in Fusion Reactors

The topic of this thesis is the influence of plasma impurities on the hydrogen retentionin metals, in the scope of plasma-wall-interaction research for fusion reactors.This is addressed experimentally and by modelling. The mechanisms of the hydrogen retention are influenced by various parameters like the wall temperature, ion energy, flux and fluence as well as the plasma composition. The plasma composition is a relevant factor for hydrogen retention in fusion reactors, as their plasma will also contain impurities like helium or seeded impurities like argon. The experiments treated in this thesis were performed in the linear plasma generator PSI-2 at Forschungszentrum Jülich, and are divided in 3 parts: The first experiments cover the plasma diagnostics, most importantly the measurement ofthe impurity ion concentration in the plasma by optical emission spectroscopy. This is a requirement for the later experiments with mixed plasmas. Diagnostics like Langmuir probe measurements are not applicable for this task because they do not distinguish different ionic species. The results also show that the impurity ion concentrations cannot be simply concluded from the neutral gas input to the plasma source, because the relation between the neutral gas concentration and impurity ion concentration is not linear. The second and main part of the experiments covers the exposure of tungsten samples to deuterium plasmas. In the experiments, the impurity ion type and concentrationis variated, to verify the general influence of helium and argon on the deuterium retention in tungsten samples exposed at low temperatures. It shows that helium impurities reduce the amount of retained deuterium by a factor of 3, while argon impurities slightly increase the total retention, compared to exposures to a pure deuterium plasma. Cross-sections of the exposed tungsten surfaces via TEM-imaging reveal a 12-15 nm deep helium nanobubble layer at the surface of the sample, while for the cases of pure deuterium or deuterium + argon exposures, a damaged layer of less than 5 nm thickness is observed. Connections between the helium nanobubbles provide a path for the molecular deuterium to the surface, which leads to the reduction of the total deuterium retention. The second part of the tungsten exposures investigates the influence of helium impurities under the variation of the ion fluence. It is found that the reduction factor for the deuterium retention stays constant inthe fluence range investigated