Prototype of a Diagnostic Calorimeter for BATMAN: Design and Preliminary Measurements

Abstract

The ITER neutral beam injection system is being designed to provide 33 MW of heating from two injectors, with an upgrade to 50 MW possible with a third injector; such heating power will be provided by accelerating negative ions to high energies, 1 MeV, and neutralizing them. These neutrals are then injected into the tokamak where they impart their energy by collisions. To study and optimize negative ion production, the SPIDER prototype is under construction in Padova, Italy, whose beam has an energy of 100 keV and a current of 48 A. The instrumented calorimeter Short-Time Retractable Instrumented Kalorimeter Experiment (STRIKE) has been designed with the main purpose of characterizing the SPIDER negative ion beam in terms of beam uniformity and beam divergence during short operations (several seconds). STRIKE is made of 16 1-D carbon fiber composite (CFC) tiles, intercepting the whole beam and observed from the rear side by infrared (IR) cameras. With two identical samples of the CFC material and the IR camera under assessment, a reduced version of the entire calorimeter has been built, with the purpose of characterizing its diagnostic properties. This mini-STRIKE was used in the BATMAN experiment at Max Planck Institut fur Plasmaphysik (Garching, Germany). As the beamlet divergence in BATMAN is large, the beamlets overlap each other in the measurement position; therefore, the mini-STRIKE for BATMAN includes a copper mask, facing the beam and featuring eight apertures. Thus, eight different portions of the beam can be simultaneously sampled, with minimal overlapping of the power coming from adjacent apertures. The copper mask was actively cooled, and calorimetry was carried out. The temperature in the center of the mask and some positions along the CFC tiles was also measured. In this paper, the design of the system is presented. The calorimetry system is presented in detail as well as the procedure adopted for calorimetrical data analysis. The results of calorimetry are presented together with preliminary correlations with the BATMAN beam features.