Lateral stress induced blistering of tungsten exposed to deuterium plasma

Surface blistering on tungsten under deuterium plasma exposure has been well known and investigated intensively in the last decade. However, the mechanism of the blistering is still unclear. There have been mainly two different models proposed: the gas driven model and lateral stress model. In this work, we designed an experiment to address this issue. Tungsten disc samples were prepared using twin-jet electro-polishing. The specimens were under deuterium plasma exposure to study the thickness effect on the surface blistering. The results showed that blistering was rarely observed on the surface around the inner edge of the central perforation with thickness of ∼100–500 nm. The blisters started to appear on the surface when the thickness was about 10 μm. Both the number and size of the blisters increased further on the outer surface with further increase in thickness. This trend was not obvious as the thickness increased up to above 180 μm. The diffusion depth of D in this work was calculated to be 8.5 μm. These results affirmed the lateral stress model as the surface blistering mechanism.