Tritium release from Li4SiO4 ceramic pebbles in high magnetic field

• Behavior of tritium release from Li4SiO4 pebbles in MF up to 7 T was investigated.
• The MF effect on tritium release is not significant according to the TPD results.
• Tritium release from the BIG sample is much easier than that from the SMALL sample.
• The MF effect on tritium diffusion was probably weakened by surface desorption.

The behavior of tritium release from Li4SiO4 ceramic pebbles in high magnetic field (MF) was investigated by temperature programmed desorption (TPD). Two batches of Li4SiO4 pebbles produced by wet method were used as the experimental samples, one batch with an average pebble diameter of 0.8 mm (the SMALL samples), and the other 1.2 mm (the BIG samples). A superconducting magnet was applied to generate MF up to 7 T in the sample area during annealing. For both batches of samples, the tritium release curves within and without MF showed very similar characteristics, indicating that the effect of high MF on tritium release behavior is not significant. The tritium release peaks for the BIG samples were observed at much lower temperatures than that for the SMALL samples, even though the grain sizes of the BIG samples are much bigger than that of the SMALL samples. It is considered that surface desorption process dominates the overall tritium release behavior in this work, which probably weakened the MF effect.