Ion Rings for Magnetic Fusion

Abstract

This Final Technical Report presents the results of the program, Ion Rings for Magnetic Fusion, which was carried out under Department of Energy funding during the period August, 1993 to January, 2005. The central objective of the program was to study the properties of field-reversed configurations formed by ion rings. In order to reach this objective, our experimental program, called the Field-reversed Ion Ring Experiment, FIREX, undertook to develop an efficient, economical technology for the production of field-reversed ion rings. A field-reversed configuration (FRC) in which the azimuthal (field-reversing) current is carried by ions with gyro-radius comparable to the magnetic separatrix radius is called a field-reversed ion ring. A background plasma is required for charge neutralization of the ring, and this plasma will be confined within the ring's closed magnetic flux. Ion rings have long been of interest as the basis of compact magnetic fusion reactors, as the basis for a high-power accelerator for an inertial fusion driver, and for other applications of high power ion beams or plasmas of high energy density. Specifically, the FIREX program was intended to address the longstanding question of the contribution of large-orbit ions to the observed stability of experimental FRCs to the MHD tilt mode. Typical experimental FRCs with s {approx} 2-4, where s is the ratio of separatrix radius to ion gyro-radius, have been stable to tilting, but desired values for a fusion reactor, s > 20, should be unstable. The FIREX ring would consist of a plasma with large s for the background ions, but with s {approx} 1 for the ring ions. By varying the proportions of these two populations, the minimum proportion of large-orbit ions necessary for stability could be determined. The incorporation of large-orbit ions, perhaps by neutral-beam injection, into an FRC has been advanced for the purpose of stabilizing, heating, controlling angular momentum, and aiding the formation of a reactor-scale FRC, and the FIREX program was intended to test the ideas behind this approach. We will describe in this report the technological development path and advances in physics understanding that allowed FIREX to reach a regime in which ion rings were reproducibly created with up to about half the current necessary to produce field reversal. Unfortunately, the experiments were limited to this level by a fundamental, unanticipated aspect of the physics of strong ion rings in plasma. The FIREX ring is a strongly anisotropic, current-carrying population of ions moving faster than the Alfven speed in the background plasma. The rapidly changing ring current excites very large-amplitude Alfven waves in the plasma, and these waves strongly affect the ring, causing rapid energy loss in a way that is not compatible with the success of the ring trapping scenario around which FIREX was designed. The result was that FIREX rings were always very short-lived. We will discuss the implication of these results for possible future use of large-orbit ions in FRCs. In short, it appears that a certain range of the parameters characterizing the ring Alfven mach number and distribution function must be avoided to allow the existence of a long-lived energetic ion component in an FRC. This report will explain why FIREX experimental results cannot be directly scaled to quantitatively predict this range for a particular FRC configuration. This will require accurate, three-dimensional simulations. FIREX results do constitute a very good dataset for validating such a code, and simulations already carried out during this program provide a guide to the important physics involved.