Fusion holds the promise of being an excellent source of
energy, capable of satisfying the world's energy demands for as
long as the Earth will exist. It is, therefore, an important
topic of research. This project looked at one specific aspect of
fusion research, that of erosion/redeposition analysis of
divertor materials. A Monte Carlo code was developed to simulate
the transport of chemically sputtered methan molecules in the
near-surface region of a Tokamak divertor.
The results of this code where compared to previously published
results using professional computer codes, namely the WBC code
written by Jeffrey N. Brooks at Argonne National Laboratory.
While our code did not exaclty match the numbers previously
published for identical plasma parameters, the results were in
the same ballpark and did show the same types of trends. This was
quite encouraging. Possible reasons for the differences include
slightly different values for the hydrocarbon gas phase reaction
rates and lack of some of the detailed transport theory in our
code that is present in codes like WBC. This refers specifically
to the velocity changing scattering collisions between ions and
the background plasma which, due to time constraints, were not
included in our code.
We also looked into the effect of varying different parameters.
These are plotted in the results section. Another interesting use
of our code would be to look at a specific problem and to try to
explain an experimental finding. Perhaps this could be a future
use of the code. Because we were able to write this code entirely
from scratch, using somewhat simplified physics, and still get
reasonable results we were quite satisfied with the end result.