Feasibility study of neutral beam injection in Thailand Tokamak-1

Abstract

Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT) is developing Thailand Tokamak-1 (TT-1) from a former device HT-6 M of China. The first hydrogen plasma will be initiated in 2023. To investigate high-β plasma and physics related to fast ions, TT-1 will be equipped with auxiliary heating systems. In this work, a feasibility study for installing a neutral beam injection (NBI) heating system in TT-1 is carried out. This work is motivated to characterize beam ion's orbits in different injection angles and to explore a condition suitable in terms of higher heating efficiency. In this work, we assume that a hydrogen beam will be launched into the TT-1 plasma with an acceleration voltage of 20 kV. The orbit simulations using the gyromotion following code LORBIT are performed in various magnetic field equilibria, i.e., different plasma current (Ip), toroidal magnetic field strength (Bt), and the magnetic axis (Rax). Furthermore, beam ions are injected in different directions, i.e., tangential co-injection and tangential counter-injection. In the case of co-injection, beam ion loss is not significant, by about 6%, whereas beam ion loss fraction is evaluated to be 26–34% in the case of counter-injection. Also, it is found that the number of lost beam ions is significantly affected by changing Ip and Rax. The results obtained in this work will directly support the experiment plan for the high-performance plasmas, design of the fast-ion diagnostic system, and systematic understanding of beam ion's confinement property and beam-ion-driven magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in TT-1.