Design and test of a remote steering upper port launcher for ITER

Abstract

An ECRH (electron-cyclotron resonance heating) launching system for the ITER upper ports is being designed. The aim of the system is to inject electron cyclotron waves (ECW) in the ITER plasma in order to stabilize neoclassical tearing modes (NTM). Each of the four upper-port launchers consists of six mm-wave lines capable of transmitting high power up to 2 MW per line at 170 GHz. In order to exploit the capability of ECW for localized heating and current drive over a range of plasma radii in ITER, the ECH&CD upper port launcher must have a beam steering capability. The remote steering (RS) principle has great advantages, because it enables to avoid steerable mirrors with flexible cooling lines at the plasma-facing end of the launcher. The principle consists of a long, corrugated, square waveguide having the steerable optics placed outside of the first confinement boundary of the vacuum vessel. All vulnerable components are far away from the hostile plasma environment. Furthermore, the RS launching system enables to do maintenance on the system during shutdown, without affecting the torus vacuum and the blanket cooling circuits.