Determination of helium and hydrogen yield from measurements on pure metals and alloys irradiated by mixed high energy proton and spallation neutron spectra in LANSCE

The confident design of accelerator-driven spallation neutron devices will require good estimates of the cross-sections for generation of helium and hydrogen in the mixed spectra of high energy protons and neutrons that will be experienced by the structural materials. Improved estimates of these cross-sections were derived from a series of irradiations that were conducted at relatively low temperatures (<100°C) in the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) as part of the test program supporting the Accelerator Production of Tritium (APT) Program. In this irradiation campaign, a variety of candidate structural alloys and pure metal dosimeter foils were irradiated in various particle spectra, ranging from 800 MeV protons, to mixed energy distributions of both protons and spallation neutrons, and finally to distributions consisting primarily of high energy neutrons. At proton energies on the order of hundreds of MeV, exceptionally high levels of gas atoms are generated in all elemental constituents of typical iron-based and nickel-based structural alloys, with helium typically on the order of ∼150 appm per dpa and hydrogen at approximately a factor of 3–5 higher. Most of the gas production is due to proton and helium recoils from the proton beam interactions with the specimens, although gas and especially damage production from lower-energy spallation neutrons becomes increasingly significant at locations farther from the beam center. The results show that helium production rate per dpa by protons in elements typically found in structural alloys is relatively insensitive to elemental composition. The measured helium concentrations and the derived cross-sections are larger by about a factor of two, however, than those calculated using the LAHET code which was optimized for prediction of neutron/proton ratios in the target tungsten source rods of the APT test. Unlike helium, the retained hydrogen levels are somewhat sensitive to composition, reflecting primarily different levels of diffusional loss, but hydrogen is still retained at rather high concentrations, allowing a lower bound estimate of the hydrogen generation rates.