Studies of mechnisms of hydrogen recycle using a plasma-wall interaction experiment

It is shown that for type 304L stainless steel at room temperature and ion energies of 100 eV a large part of the recycling occurs with hydrogen residence times in the wall of about 100 ms. The use of wall temperatures from 80 to 500 K permits differentiation between thermally activated processes and ion bombardment-induced phenomena. For low energy ions (100 eV) onto 300 K stainless steel walls recycling increases to more than 90% in a few tenths of a second at 3 x 1016 ions cm-2s-1. For ions up to 300 eV at this flux there is little energy dependence. Both thermally- and ion-induced processes can be important at room temperature, but under the conditions of this study thermal processes greatly enhance the recycle rates at 300 and 500 K. Preliminary results indicate that recombination of atomic hydrogen to molecular hydrogen can be rate controlling in some practical regimes. (orig.)