NCSX Plasma Heating Methods

Abstract

The NCSX (National Compact Stellarator Experiment) has been designed to accommodate a variety of heating systems, including ohmic heating, neutral-beam injection, and radio-frequency. Neutral beams will provide one of the primary heating methods for NCSX. In addition to plasma heating, beams are also expected to provide a means for external control over the level of toroidal plasma rotation velocity and its profile. The plan is to provide 3 MW of 50 keV balanced neutral-beam tangential injection with pulse lengths of 500 msec for initial experiments, and to be upgradeable to pulse lengths of 1.5 sec. Subsequent upgrades will add 3 MW of neutral-beam injection. This Chapter discusses the NCSX neutral-beam injection requirements and design issues, and shows how these are provided by the candidate PBX-M (Princeton Beta Experiment-Modification) neutral-beam injection system. In addition, estimations are given for beam-heating efficiencies, scaling of heating efficiency with machine size an d magnetic field level, parameter studies of the optimum beam-injection tangency radius and toroidal injection location, and loss patterns of beam ions on the vacuum chamber wall to assist placement of wall armor and for minimizing the generation of impurities by the energetic beam ions. Finally, subsequent upgrades could add an additional 6 MW of radio-frequency heating by mode-conversion ion-Bernstein wave (MCIBW) heating, and if desired as possible future upgrades, the design also will accommodate high-harmonic fast-wave and electron-cyclotron heating. The initial MCIBW heating technique and the design of the radio-frequency system lend themselves to current drive, so that if current drive became desirable for any reason only minor modifications to the heating system described here would be needed. The radio-frequency system will also be capable of localized ion heating (bulk or tail), and possibly ion-Bernstein-wave-generated sheared flows.