Modeling Hydrogen Transport and Trapping in Vacancy Clusters: Application to the ITER-Like Monoblocks

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发表日期：

2025年7月11日

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S. Chroeun,
S. Ben Ayed,
S. Bian,
T. Wauters,
X. Bonnin,
M. Gaspérini,
J. Mougenot,
Y. Charles

摘要

Nanovoid creation in tungsten is the primary cause of the formation and growth of hydrogen nanobubbles, which may induce macroscopic crack and blister formation at the surfaces of plasma facing components. This work focuses on the modeling of hydrogen transport and trapping in vacancy clusters within divertor monoblocks, using clustering dynamics model coupled with hydrogen transport and heat transfer. The vacancy clustering model considers clusters of up to 9 vacancies, $V_1$ $V_{1}$ to $V_9$ $V_{9}$ . Vacancy clusters are considered as hydrogen traps, with their mobility assumed to be hydrogen-dependent. The implementation is carried out in Abaqus finite element (FE) software to solve thermomechanical coupling problem. Several case studies are made to understand the behaviour of hydrogen in the ITER-like monoblocks. The results show that vacancy cluster-like traps act as barriers to hydrogen transport, reducing the motion of the diffusion front and enhancing hydrogen retention near the top surface of the monoblock. They also suggest the significant role of the largest vacancies clusters.