Reduction of poloidal magnetic flux consumption during plasma current ramp-up in DEMO relevant plasma regimes

Abstract

The method for reducing a poloidal magnetic flux consumption of external coils is investigated to reduce the size of the central solenoid (CS) in the DEMO reactor. The reduction of the poloidal magnetic flux consumption during a plasma current ramp-up phase by electron cyclotron (EC) heating is investigated using an integrated modeling code suite, TOPICS. A strongly reversed shear q profile tends to be produced if intense off-axis EC heating is applied to obtain a large reduction of the flux consumption. In order to overcome this tendency, we find a method to obtain the optimum temperature profile which minimizes the poloidal flux consumption for a wide range of the q profile. We try to reproduce the optimum temperature profile for a weakly reversed shear q profile using six EC rays of 20 MW. As a result, the resistive flux consumption during the current ramp-up can be reduced by 63% from the estimation using the Ejima constant of 0.45 and the total flux consumption can be reduced by 20% from the conventional estimation. In addition, we find that the resistive flux consumption is closely related to the volume averaged electron temperature and not to the profile shape. Using this relation, the required heating power is estimated to be 31 MW based on a well established global confinement scaling, ITER L-89P. As a result, it is clarified that the poloidal magnetic flux consumption can be reduced by 20% using 20–31 MW of EC heating for a weakly reversed shear q profile. This reduction of the flux consumption accounts for 10% reduction of the CS radius.