Damage evolution in Plasma Facing Materials by a sequential multiscale approach

Abstract

Describing the time evolution of Plasma Facing Materials (PFMs), through quantitative evaluations 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 in-cell algorithm for the nano-scale erosion simulation 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.