ERO2.0 modelling of the effects of surface roughness on molybdenum erosion and redeposition in the PSI-2 linear plasma device

The surface morphology of plasma-facing components (PFCs) and its evolution during plasma irradiation has been shown to have a significant effect on the erosion and subsequent transport of sputtered particles in plasma. This in turn can influence the resulting lifetime of PFCs. A model for treatment of the effect of surface roughness on the erosion of PFCs has recently been incorporated into the three-dimensional Monte Carlo code ERO2.0. First simulations have confirmed a significant influence of the assumed surface roughness (for both regular and stochastic numerically constructed samples) on both the effective sputtering yields Y _eff and the effective angular distributions of sputtered particles. In this study, a series of experiments at the linear plasma device PSI-2 are conducted to test the effect of surface roughness on the sputtering parameters. Graphite samples prepared with a 100 nm molybdenum layer with various surface roughness characteristic sizes (R _a = 110 nm, 280 nm, 600 nm and R _a < 20 nm) were exposed to a helium plasma in the PSI-2 linear plasma device at a magnetic field B = 0.1 T. These PSI-2 experiments were simulated using ERO2.0 with a surface morphology model. Simulations are able to reproduce the experimentally observed significant suppression of erosion for higher R _a values.