Estimation of partial pressure during graphite conditioning by matrix method

Plasma Facing Components (PFC) of SST-1 tokamak are designed to be compatible for UHV as it is kept in the main vacuum vessel. Graphite is the most widely used plasma facing material in present day tokamaks. High thermal shock resistance and low atomic number carbon are the most important properties of graphite for this application. However, graphite is porous and absorbs gases, which may be released during plasma operation. Graphite tiles are baked at high temperature of about 1000 °C in high vacuum (10−5 Torr) for several hours before installing them in the tokamak to remove the impurities (mainly water vapour and metal impurities), which may have been deposited during machining of the tiles‥ The measurements of the released gas (such as H2, H2O, CO, CO2, Hydrocarbons, etc.) from graphite tiles during baking are accomplished with the help of a Quadrupole Mass Analyzer (QMA). Since, the output of this measurement is a mass spectrum and not the partial pressures of the residual gases, one needs to adopt some procedure to convert the spectrum to obtain the partial pressures. The conventional method of analysis is tedious and time consuming. We propose a new approach based on constructing a set of linear equations and solving them using matrix operations. This is a simple method compared to the conventional one and also eliminates the limitations of the conventional method. A Fortran program has been developed which identifies the likely gases present in the vacuum system and calculates their partial pressures from the data of the residual gas analyzers. Application of this method of calculating partial pressures from mass spectra data will be discussed in detail in this paper.