Sputtering of Graphite by Hydrogen Isotopes in the Fusion Environment: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study

Abstract

The sputtering of graphite due to the bombardment of hydrogen isotopes is crucial to successfully using graphite in the fusion environment. In this work, we use molecular dynamics to simulate the sputtering using the large-scale atomic/molecular massively parallel simulator (lammps). The calculation results show that the peak values of the sputtering yield are between 25 eV and 50 eV. When the incident energy is greater than the energy corresponding to the peak value, a lower carbon sputtering yield is obtained. The temperature that is most likely to sputter is approximately 800 K for hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium. Below the 800 K, the sputtering yields increase with temperature. By contrast, above the 800 K, the yields decrease with increasing temperature. Under the same temperature and incident energy, the sputtering rate of tritium is greater than that of deuterium, which in turn is greater than that of hydrogen. When the incident energy is 25 eV, the sputtering yield at 300 K increases below an incident angle at 30 deg and remains steady after that.