Trap effect of vacancy on hydrogen diffusivity in bcc-Fe

DQ Zhu and T Oda, JOURNAL OF NUCLEAR MATERIALS, 469, 237-243 (2016).

DOI: 10.1016/j.jnucmat.2015.12.001

Evaluation of tritium effective diffusivity in structural materials with defects is essential to appropriately estimate the accumulation and leakage of tritium in fusion reactors. In the present work, we focus on the trap effect of vacancy on the diffusivity of hydrogen in bcc-Fe. The hydrogen effective diffusivities in different bcc-Fe systems with varied hydrogen/vacancy ratios (H/V ratios) are evaluated by using molecular statics (MS) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and are compared with that in the system without vacancy. The hydrogen effective diffusivity is obviously decreased due to the vacancy trap effect. The trap effect is more profound in small H/V-ratio systems due to the dependence of V-H binding energy on the number of trapped H atoms. The trapped H atoms hardly contribute to hydrogen diffusivity because of the difficulty in detrapping and small mobility of V-H complex. This fact results in a good correlation between the effective diffusivity of hydrogen and the fraction of H atoms solute in the bulk without being trapped by vacancy. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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