An integration design model for a large-scale negative ion accelerator of neutral beam injection system for fusion application

Abstract

Design processes of a large-scale negative ion accelerator for neutral beam injection (NBI) application involve a series of physics and engineering issues, which include high voltage holding, background gas and stripping losses, beamlets optics and steering, particle and power flux on the grid electrodes, heat removal, thermal deformation, and stress of the grids. A self-consistent design model covering all these critical issues has been developed, where the results of one design aspect can be directly plugged into another one as the input conditions with little approximation or assumption. This design model has been applied to the negative ion accelerator of the NBI test facility of CRAFT (Comprehensive Research Facility for Fusion Technology), which is designed to produce a negative hydrogen ion beam of 25 A with the particle energy of 400 keV and the pulse duration of 3600 s. The accelerated current density is required to be 210 A/m2 from 768 apertures with a diameter of 14 mm. The evaluated results of the CRAFT accelerator design are quantitatively analyzed. Additionally, the modeling is applied to a large-scale and relatively complete structure of the multi-grid electrodes. Hence, some nonuniformities or special distributions appear in different design issues, which were not noticed in the reference works.