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Review on helium behaviors in nanochannel tungsten film

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Abstract

Tungsten (W) as plasma facing material (PFM) needs to face an unprecedented harsh environment in the fusion reactor, which puts forward high requirements for its radiation tolerance. Among the many challenges, the rapid accumulation of helium (He) atoms to form numerous bubbles or even “fuzzy” nanostructure leads to swelling and embrittlement of W matrix and seriously shorten its service life, which is one of the most serious problems faced by PFM-W at present. In this review, we summarize the recent works on the nanochannel W films with high surface-to-volume ratio deposited by magnetron sputtering, and the behaviors of He in the nanochannel W films at different fusion-related irradiation environment. Experimental and simulation results showed that the nanochannel W films have better radiation tolerance performance in managing He behaviors than that of commercial bulk W.

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Fig. 1
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Reproduced with permission from Ref. [27]. Copyright 2018 Elsevier

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Reproduced with permission from Ref. [34]. Copyright 2019 Elsevier

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Reproduced with permission from Ref. [34]. Copyright 2019 Elsevier

Fig. 7

Reproduced with permission from Ref. [39]. Copyright 2018 Institute of Physics (IOP)

Fig. 8

Reproduced from the Ref. [27]. Copyright 2018 Elsevier

Fig. 9

Reproduced with permission from Ref. [46]. Copyright 2019 IOP

Fig. 10

Reproduced with permission from Ref. [46]. Copyright 2019 IOP

Fig. 11

Reproduced with permission from Ref. [47]. Copyright 2020 Elsevier

Fig. 12

Reproduced with permission from Ref. [27]. Copyright 2018 Elsevier

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (Grant No. 11522543), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11905058, 11935011 and 11475129), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (Grant Nos. 2020CFA041 and 2016CFA080), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Matter Microstructure and Function of Hunan Province, Synergetic Innovation Center for Quantum Effects and Application, School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, 410081, China

    Wen-Jing Qin

  2. Center for Ion Beam Application and Center for Electron Microscopy, School of Physics and Technology, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Wen-Jing Qin, Wei Guo, Tao Cheng, Jun Tang, Chang-Zhong Jiang & Feng Ren

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  1. Wen-Jing Qin
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  2. Wei Guo
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  3. Tao Cheng
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  6. Feng Ren
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Contributions

Wen-jing Qin wrote the draft; Wei Guo, Tao Cheng, and Jun Tang collected the data; Chang-Zhong Jiang and Feng Ren contributed to conceived the idea of the study. All authors contributed to the writing and revisions.

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Correspondence to Feng Ren.

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Qin, WJ., Guo, W., Cheng, T. et al. Review on helium behaviors in nanochannel tungsten film. Tungsten 3, 369–381 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42864-021-00097-3

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