Assessment of the ITER divertor bolometer diagnostic performance

Abstract

The ITER bolometer diagnostic will provide measurements of the total radiation emitted from the plasma, a part of the overall energy balance. It will consist of some 550 lines of sight (LOS) of bolometer detector, bundled in multiple individual cameras, which will be located in the gaps between blanket modules on the vacuum vessel wall, in five divertor cassettes, in two upper port plugs and in one equatorial port plug (Meister et al., 2017). The LOS are optimised as much as possible with design constraints to capture the details of different plasma regions in which the intensity and local distribution of radiation will vary over a large range. This is especially true in the divertor, where up to 70 % of the total thermal exhaust power from the core will have to be radiated during burning plasma operation. This radiation will be tightly concentrated meaning that not only will tomographic reconstruction of the distribution be challenging, but the bolometer cameras themselves need to be properly designed to handle the resulting heat fluxes. This paper first presents an assessment of the photonic heat fluxes falling on bolometers in the divertor region during high performance operation (where the heat fluxes will be highest). These heat fluxes are computed using ray-tracing from radiation distributions obtained with the SOLPS (plasma boundary region) and JINTRAC (plasma core region) codes and will serve as essential input to the thermal design studies of bolometers. The same SOLPS and JINTRAC simulations are used as models for the second focus of the paper which examines how closely the radiation distribution obtained from tomographic inversion of synthetic signals from the bolometer LOS matches the model input. Some effort has also been devoted to a study of how the reconstructions are affected by loss of individual LOS.