Simulating Tritium Retention in Tungsten with a Multiple Trap Model in the TMAP Code

Accurately predicting the quantity of tritium retained in plasma facing components is a key safety issue for licensing future fusion power reactors. Retention of tritium in the lattice damage caused when high energy neutrons collide with atoms in the structural material of the reactor’s plasma facing components (PFCs) is an area of ongoing experimental research at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) under the US/Japan TITAN collaboration. Recent experiments with the Tritium Plasma Experiment (TPE), located in the INL’s Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) facility, demonstrate that this damage can only be simulated by computer codes like the Tritium Migration Analysis Program (TMAP) if one assumes that the lattice damage produced by these neutrons results in multiple types of hydrogen traps (energy wells) within the material, each possessing a different trap energy and density. Previous attempts to simulate the quantity of deuterium released from neutron irradiated TPE tungsten targets indicated that at least six different traps are required by TMAP to model this release. In this paper we describe a recent extension of the TMAP trap site model to include as many traps as required by the user to simulate retention of tritium in neutron damaged tungsten. This model has been applied to data obtained for tungsten irradiated to a damage level of 0.025 dpa in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) after exposure to a plasma in TPE.