Design and platform testing of the compact torus central fueling device for the EAST tokamak

Abstract

Compact torus (CT) injection is a highly promising technique for the central fueling of future reactor-grade fusion devices since it features extremely high injection velocity and relatively high plasma mass. Recently, a CT injector for the EAST tokamak, EAST-CTI, was developed and platform-tested. In the first round of experiments conducted with low parameter settings, the maximum velocity and mass of the CT plasma were 150 km·s−1 and 90 μg, respectively. However, the parameters obtained by EAST-CTI were still very low and were far from the requirements of a device such as EAST that has a strong magnetic field. In future, we plan to solve the spark problem that EAST-CTI currently encounters (that mainly hinders the further development of experiments) through engineering methods, and use greater power to obtain a more stable and suitable CT plasma for EAST.