Study of Thermal Desorption of Helium from Hydrogenated Zirconium

A new method prepared for helium and hydrogen co-containing Zr films is presented to simulate aging metal tritides, in which direct current magnetron sputtering with a He/H/Ar mixture is used. The retained amount and depth profiles of helium and hydrogen are determined by elastic recoil detection analysis. Thermal desorption spectrometry is applied to investigate He thermal release and the effect of hydrogen. It is found that the high-temperature peaks with a large mount of helium release obviously shifted toward lower temperature at high hydrogen concentration, especially at the hydride transformation region, and that the shapes of the release peaks also changed due to the additional hydrogen. However, at the low-temperature releasing region the peak intense decreases when phase transformation takes place. The mechanism of helium thermal release and the effect of hydrogen are also discussed.