Iodine Beam Dump Design and Fabrication

During the testing of electric thrusters, high-energy ions impacting the walls of a vacuum chamber can cause corrosion and/or sputtering of the wall materials, which can damage the chamber walls. The sputtering can also introduce the constituent materials of the chamber walls into an experiment, with those materials potentially migrating back to the test article and coating it with contaminants over time. The typical method employed in this situation is to install a beam dump fabricated from materials that have a lower sputter yield, thus reducing the amount of foreign material that could migrate towards the test article or deposit on anything else present in the vacuum facility.