Formularization of the confinement enhancement factor as a function of the heating profile for FFHR-d1 core plasma design

Abstract

A quantitative estimation of the confinement enhancement due to the heating profile effect is introduced to the helical fusion DEMO reactor design of FFHR-d1, based on the experimental results of the Large Helical Device. By applying this to the direct profile extrapolation (DPE) method, radial profiles in the reactor are extrapolated from experimental results. In reactor plasmas, the heat deposition profile of alpha heating is expected to be peaked in the core region as in the case of tangential neutral beam (NB) injection on low-density plasmas. The height of the pressure profile normalized by the gyro-Bohm-type parameter dependence increases with the power (∼0.6) of the peaking factor of the heat deposition profile, as long as the core confinement degradation observed in low-density plasmas is ignored. According to this observation, the confinement enhancement factor expected under the self-ignition condition ranges from ∼1.1 to ∼1.7, for example, depending on the used data. Degradation of the global energy confinement observed in high-density NB-heated plasmas is mitigated and the gyro-Bohm-type parameter dependence reappears after introducing the confinement enhancement due to the heating profile effect. Finally, typical example profiles in FFHR-d1 are provided by the DPE method for future analyses.