Driven by the stringent service conditions of aviation, aerospace, and military equipment, parallel seam welding, as an advanced resistance-welding packaging process, has been widely applied in ceramic-metal packages that require high hermeticity, owing to its excellent sealing performance and reliability. In this study, targeting the hermeticity failures that appear in parallel seam-welded ceramic packages after temperature cycling, molecular dynamics simulation is used to systematically investigate helium diffusion in nanoscale interfacial microchannels and its effect on hermeticity. On the LAMMPS platform, a three-region model is constructed that includes a helium-charging region, a wall-channel region composed of Fe, Ni, and Au, and a vacuum leak region. The Lennard-Jones potential is used to describe interatomic interactions, and a thermal-cycling environment conforming to MIL-STD-883, with a temperature range from -50°C to +125°C, is simulated to represent actual service conditions. The simulation results show that when the channel diameter is less than or equal to 1.2 nanometers, the number of leaked helium atoms remains constant at approximately 22 and is not affected by temperature; when the diameter is greater than or equal to 1.6 nanometers, the leakage exhibits significant temperature dependence. For example, in a 2.6-nanometer channel, 212 atoms leak at 423 K and 176 atoms at 223 K. Both leakage flux and leak rate increase markedly with channel size. OVITO analysis confirms that helium diffusion exhibits molecular-flow characteristics; at very small apertures, atomic escape efficiency is limited by the frequency of collisions with the wall.
These findings provide insight for improving hermetic packaging and reliability of critical electronics used in aviation, aerospace, and military equipment.