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Measurement and modeling of aluminum sputtering and ionization in the DIII-D divertor including magnetic pre-sheath effects

Journal Article · · Nuclear Fusion
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [2];  [6];  [7];  [4];  [4];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [10];  [4];  [3]
  1. General Atomics, San Diego, CA (United States); Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States); General Atomics
  2. Univ. of Toronto, ON (Canada)
  3. Univ. of California, San Diego, CA (United States)
  4. General Atomics, San Diego, CA (United States)
  5. China Academy of Sciences, Hefei (China)
  6. Oak Ridge Associated Univ., Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  7. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States). Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering
  8. Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)
  9. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
  10. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

We present analysis and modeling of Al sputtering and ionization in attached, low-power L-mode plasmas near the outer divertor strike point of the DIII-D tokamak. Al serves as a useful proxy for Be, the low-Z main wall material for ITER and JET, because of its distinguishability from background sources in DIII-D (namely C and B) and long ionization mean free path compared to its gyro radius ( !" #$%&' ~ 2.5). Using neutral Al emission imaging techniques, we measured a toroidal and radial asymmetry in the shape of the photo-emission plumes of sputtered neutral Al that was consistent with previously observed asymmetry in the distribution of redeposited Al in these experiments. The asymmetry was reproduced using models including full angular distributions of sputtering yield and energy, but not when symmetric, mono-energetic cosine sputtering distributions were assumed. Models of the redeposition in these and other similar previous experiments had assumed cosine angular distributions of yield and directionally uniform sputtered energy distributions and consistently underestimated the extent of the upstream/downstream asymmetry observed. We propose that a significant angular sputtering asymmetry occurs due to grazing angle incident ions resulting from the magnetic field geometry of the divertor. We use an ion orbit tracking model to calculate the distributions of ion impact energies through the potential gradient in the magnetic pre-sheath and Debye sheath. We find that as the magnetic field pitch angle decreases and the Debye sheath vanishes, the majority of ions strike the surface at <15 degrees with respect to the surface plane, leading to sputtering angular and energy distributions with significant forward-scattering bias. We also observe evidence of directional sputtering and ion flux shadowing consistent with the calculated ion angle distributions.

Research Organization:
General Atomics, San Diego, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
FC02-04ER54698
OSTI ID:
1463639
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1890820
OSTI ID: 1465186
OSTI ID: 22929516
OSTI ID: 1473702
Journal Information:
Nuclear Fusion, Journal Name: Nuclear Fusion Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 58; ISSN 0029-5515
Publisher:
IOP ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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