A practical sublimation source for large-scale chromium gettering in fusion devices

This paper describes the technique of chromium gettering with a large-scale sublimation source which resembles in its design the VARIAN Ti-Ball. It consists of a hollow chromium sphere with a diameter of approximately 3 cm and an incandescent filament for radiation heating from inside the ball. While the fabrication of the source is described in a companion paper, we discuss here the gettering technique. The experimental arrangement consists of an UHV system instrumented for total- and partial-pressure measurements, a film-thickness monitor, thermocouples, an optical pyrometer, and appropriate instrumentation to measure the heating power. The results show the temperature and corresponding sublimation rate of the Cr-Ball as function of input power. In addition, an example of the total pumping speed of a gettered surface is shown.