Helium neutral beam injection into ASDEX Upgrade

Abstract

ASDEX Upgrade's (AUG) neutral beam injection (NBI) system is primarily designed for deuterium injection and delivers 20MW heating power from two injectors with four beams each at 60 and 93keV, respectively. As opposed to the cryo pumps of the JET NBI, the Ti getter pumps of the AUG NBI with a pumping speed of 3×106ℓ/s for hydrogen do not pump helium at all, leaving only the conventional pumping system with <6×103ℓ/s for He. This imposes constraints on the possible operation in helium.In order to prepare for AUG He plasma campaigns, serious trials to operate the AUG NBI with He began in 2014. It was found that despite the lack of high speed pumping up to two beams per injector could be operated simultaneously at reduced feed gas flow without particular restrictions on the beam-on time. For injector 1 the power per beam was limited to 550kW at 40keV by the required filament current in its arc sources, while for injector 2 the limitation came from the bending magnet's power supply that restricted the beam energy to 68keV and the NBI power to 730kW per beam. Thus the maximum available NBI heating power in He amounts to 2.6MW for 10s, the maximum discharge duration of AUG. Helium neutral beam injection into plasma was first tried out in 2014 for two discharges. In 2015 a dedicated He campaign used He NBI in a total of 44 discharges. As He is almost not pumped in the injectors the neutral gas flow into the torus is comparable with the total He gas puff.