Analytic description of the chemical erosion of graphite by hydrogen ions

One main concern about the use of graphite as a plasma facing material is the enhanced erosion under hydrogen bombardment due to hydrocarbon formation. In view of the lifetime evaluation of plasma exposed carbon components and of impurity production in present and future machines such as ITER, an analytical expression for the erosion yield by chemical sputtering for the relevant energies, temperatures and incident fluxes is of special importance. An extrapolation to fluxes and energies relevant for high density divertor plasmas has not been possible up to now on the basis of semiempirical fits to laboratory data. Starting from a short review of the existing empirical formulas, recent detailed investigations of the atomistic processes for the thermally activated hydrocarbon emission are described, which enable the formulation of an improved analytical description including the ion flux as a parameter. The chemical erosion of graphite by hydrogen bombardment results from two processes: the thermally activated hydrocarbon emission, Y-therm, and a surface process at low energies and low temperatures resulting from the kinetic ejection of surface hydrocarbon complexes from collisional energy transfer, Y-surf. The new analytic description can be fitted well to the existing data for ion beam erosion, and extrapolation to divertor relevant fluxes is possible. At high ion fluxes the maximum of chemical erosion is shifted to higher temperatures, where annealing of damaged structures leads to a stronger reduction of Y-therm than previously estimated. There are no data on a possible flux dependence of Y-surf, leaving still some uncertainty in extrapolation.