Ion-Current and Schottky Effects in Thermionic Diodes

Abstract

Articles you may be interested inThe effect of ion drift on the sheath, presheath, and ion-current collection for cylinders in a collisionless plasma Phys. Plasmas 12, 062109 (2005); 10.1063/1.1924392 Novel compact electrostatic ion-current detector using a self-collection method for secondaryelectron suppression Rev.Effects of hydrogen ion implantation on Al/Si Schottky diodes Appl. Phys. Lett. 50, 1530 (1987); 10.1063/1.97821 Effect of antimony ion implantation on Alsilicon Schottky diode characteristicsAn experimental and theoretical study is made of current nonsaturation phenomena in cesium vapor, thermionic diodes. It is shown that ion flow from the plasma to the emitter electrode produces a significant nonsaturation effect. It is also shown that this ion current produces a high-sheath field at the emitter which accentuates the nonsaturation through the Schottky and anomalous Schottky effects. These effects are incorporated into an analysis of diode behavior. It is shown that the expected diode behavior due to ioncurrent and Schottky effects is consistent with available experimental data.implications of plasma-transport processes due to electron-neutral collisions are becoming clear.4-6 The significance of electron-ion contributions to cesium plasma transport phenomena has been studied. 7 -9 Descriptions of the complicated, multistage ion-generation and recombination processes have been de-4 N. S.

Analytical and experimental studies relating to the simulated start-up of in-core thermionic reactor systems

“…Surface contributions were investigated by Rasor and Warner (1964), Levine and Gyftopoulos (1964), and Steiner and Gyftopoulos (1967). Schottky effects have been reported by Hansen (1965aHansen ( , 1967. However, only Wilkins has successfully produced a computational model capable of representing a diode's performance characteristics over a wide range of operating variables.…”