Coaxial Gyrotron Research Articles

The coaxial gyrotron with two electron beams. II. Dual frequency operation

The dual frequency operation (DFO) of the coaxial gyrotron with two electron beams (CGTB) has been investigated in this part by means of both linear theory and computer simulation. In such an operation, the cavity is at degeneration and one beam works at the first harmonic while another at high harmonic. Making use of the coupled-mode theory, the dispersion equation considering the coupling of two beams and two modes has been obtained. The results of the numerical calculation and the particle in cell simulation show that CGTB with DFO can obtain high output power at two different frequencies simultaneously. In addition, the power of the high harmonic can be enhanced due to the nonlinear coupling between two beams, and some interesting and important phenomena of CGTB with DFO revealed in the paper are of significance in physics.

EC power sources: European technological developments towards ITER

The activities in Europe towards the development of the EC power sources for ITER are centered on the development of a 170 GHz, 2 MW, CW coaxial cavity gyrotron of collector potential depressed (CPD) type. A gyrotron with a higher unit power than the ITER reference (1 MW) would yield a reduction of the installation costs, a more compact launcher design and, if required, an increase of the power delivered through one port. Tests proving the principle were successfully performed on a short-pulse experimental gyrotron delivering up to 2.2 MW in single mode. Following this success, a coordinated and fully consistent programme of development has been launched. The first industrial 2 MW prototype is now at an advanced stage of construction. The associated superconductive magnet producing 6.86 T on the cavity axis is also being procured. Dummy loads suitable for short and CW operation are also part of the development effort. Finally, a new EC test facility, with the features necessary for the testing of the gyrotron up to full power in CW, has been established and includes a fully solid-state power supply system.

Advances in high power calorimetric matched loads for short pulses and CW gyrotrons

The development of high power gyrotrons for plasma physics research needs properly matched calorimetric loads able to absorb and measure the power, which nowadays is foreseen to be as high as 2 MW during CW operations. To this end IFP/CNR has developed a family of matched loads useful in the mm-wave frequency band for applications ranging from a few ms to CW in pulse length. The different loads in the family, made of an integrating sphere with a partially reflecting coating on the inner wall, are characterized by having the same absorbing geometry for the incoming beam and a different heat removal system for the specific application. Some important advances have been recently achieved from the point of view of the uniformity of power distribution on the absorbing wall and of the load construction. With the high precision achieved in the coating thickness a better control of the heating power distribution is possible by proper shaping of the local reflectivity, in addition to the shaping of the mirror dispersing the input beam. A more sophisticated model describing the power distribution has been developed, taking into account a variable thickness of the absorbing coating, the proper shape of the spreading mirror, the frequency of the incoming radiation and the shape of the input beam. Lower coating thickness is shown to be preferable, for a given local reflectivity, from the point of view of a lower peak temperature and thermal stress. The paper describes a load with variable coating thickness along the meridian of the sphere, showing a uniform power deposition on the inner walls. The cooling pipe is completely electroformed on the spherical copper shell, ensuring the maintenance of the correct curvature of the inner surface and fast heat conduction from the absorbing coating to the water through the thin copper body. For CW use all heated parts of the load must be cooled and this is achieved with 16 electroformed spiral channels. Both short pulse loads (0.1–1 s) and the CW version at 2 MW, 170 GHz, are described in the paper. High power tests on short-pulse loads have been done using a double frequency gyrotron, 105 GHz/600 kW for 0.5 s and 140 GHz/800 kW for 1 s. Also a method for emulating 2 MW conditions while using 1 MW gyrotron has been applied to test the load to be used for the European 2 MW coaxial cavity gyrotron development programme.

Installation and commisionning of the EU test facility for ITER gyrotrons

In the frame of the EU program on the ITER electron cyclotron wave (ECW) system, the development of a 170 GHz, 2 MW CW coaxial gyrotron with depressed collector (C-GT170) has been launched during the Sixth Framework Program (2003–2006) in the European Technology Workplan. Such development relies on the availability of a test facility (TF) capable of providing both the energy sources and sinks required by this new electron tube (electrical energy, cooling capacity), and allowing the control and acquisition of a large range of signals used to understand and improve the gyrotron behaviour. The TF will be used, in a later stage, for the component test of the ITER ECW system. This paper will report on the design, installation and commissioning of the TF in Lausanne.

A COAXIAL MAGNETRON INJECTION GUN (CMIG) FOR A 2 MW, 170 GHz COAXIAL CAVITY GYROTRON

An electron gun (80 kV / 75 A) for a 170 GHz coaxial cavity gyrotron has been designed, fabricated and tested. Special care has been devoted to the design of the technical part of the electron gun in order to avoid trapping of electrons, which may result in a limitation of the high voltage performance due to built-up of a Penning discharge which may limit the high voltage performance. The performance of the electron gun and electron beam has been found to be well in agreement with the design objective. A stable operation up to Ib = 80 A and Uc = 80 kV has been obtained without any observable beam instabilities. No limitations in high voltage performance due to built-up of a Penning discharge occurred. The influence of the type of electron flow on gyrotron performance has been studied experimentally. The maximum output power has been obtained for an intermediate type of flow.

EU developments of the ITER ECRH system

The EU will be providing the largest contribution to the ITER electron cyclotron (EC) heating and current drive (H&CD) system (20 MW, CW at 170 GHz). The contribution includes one third of the H&CD gyrotrons, their associated power supplies and four upper port launcher antennas. In all areas of participation, the EU EC partnership (coordinated by the European Fusion Development Agreement) aims toward advancing the technology, while staying within a specified cost envelope. This is portrayed in the co-axial gyrotron development that offers the potential to double the output power per source (2.0 MW), increasing the delivered power for a fixed number of auxiliary systems. The EU partnerships also attempt to increase performance for the entire EC system, in particular the launching antennas. The proposed front steering launcher design offers greater control of MHD activity than the previous remote steering design and opens up the possibility of an enhanced performance UL. The EC physics requirements are repartitioned between the upper and equatorial launchers for a synergetic balance, which increases the EC physics capabilities while relaxing some of the engineering requirements.

Numerical Simulation Study of Double-Beam Magnetron-Injection Guns for High-Power Gyrotrons

This paper describes the detailed design of the double-beam coaxial magnetron-injection gun (DBMIG) for use in Ka-band coaxial gyrotron with two beams operating in the harmonic mode. The DBMIG operating voltage is 70 kV with a total beam current of 20 A, evenly divided among the beamlets, and provides two 70-kV 10-A beams with a velocity ratio of 1.5. The minimum of the transverse velocity spread and the axial velocity spread are about 3% and 5%, respectively. The emitter current density has been kept below 10 Amiddotcm-2 (space-charge limited). The primary computational tools used in the design process were the self-consistent particle-in-cell simulation code MAGIC

Singular and Hypersingular Integral Equations Techniques for Gyrotron Coaxial Resonators with a Corrugated Insert

For the first time rigorous theory is developed for eigen traveling TM modes in the resonator of the coaxial cavity gyrotron with a corrugated insert. This mathematical model can be applied for any corrugation parameters and wavelengths. Gyrotron simulation software is developed and allows to calculate mode eigenvalues, electromagnetic field components and Ohmic losses for eigen TE and TM modes. Results of the numerical investigations are presented for the ITER relevant 170 GHz coaxial cavity gyrotron developed in Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Germany.

LOW POWER MEASUREMENTS ON THE NEW RF OUTPUT SYSTEM OF A 170 GHZ, 2 MW COAXIAL CAVITY GYROTRON

The design of the quasi optical (q. o.) RF output system for the first industrial prototype of the European 170 GHz, 2 MW, CW coaxial cavity gyrotron for electron cyclotron heating and current drive in ITER has been verified at a low power level. Results of measurements with a high quality TE34,19-mode generator are in good agreement with the design calculations. This strengthens the confidence both to the employed design codes and to the manufacturing quality of the launcher and mirrors.

Analyse eines neuartigen 1.5 MW, 170 GHz Prototyp-Gyrotrons mit koaxialem Resonator

A 170 GHz, 2 MW coaxial cavity gyrotron is under development at the Institut fur Hochleistungsimpuls- und Mikrowellentechnik (IHM) at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) which will be used as a high power microwave source for heating, current drive and stability control of plasmas in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). At frequencies above about 100 GHz the output power of conventional gyrotrons with cylindrical hollow waveguide cavities is limited to 1 MW in CW operation mainly due to the high Ohmic losses and the space charge voltage depression of the electron beam. The coaxial geometry enables a reduction of the mode competition in the gyrotron resonator and decreases also the influence of the beam voltage depression. As result a very high order operating mode (for example TE 34,19 at 170 GHz) can be chosen which ultimately allows to increase the output power of the gyrotron in CW operation to a value as high as 2 MW. A first prototype of the 170 GHz, 2 MW coaxial cavity gyrotron has been designed, built and experimentally tested in short pulse operation at FZK. The main goal of this work was to investigate experimentally the design of the critical gyrotron components such as electron gun, resonator and a quasi-optical RF system. Those components are same as used in the first industrial coaxial prototype gyrotron for ITER. During the experiments a strong instability was observed inside the gyrotron tube due to the excitation of parasitic low frequency oscillations. The mechanism of the oscillations has been studied and possibilities for their suppression of these oscillations are proposed and experimentally verified. The RF output system is one of the most critical components. It is responsible for the coupling of the gyrotron power out of the gyrotron by converting the microwave power generated in the TE 34,19 -mode into a fundamental free space TEM 0,0 Gaussian mode. The performance of the RF output system has been tested in low power cold measurements. To perform the cold tests of the RF output system, the TE 34,19 -mode was excited at 170 GHz using a special low power mode generator. The results of the experimental tests and the general problems associated with the design of the coaxial cavity gyrotron are presented and discussed in this thesis.

Eigenvalues and Ohmic Losses in Coaxial Gyrotron Cavity

The authors present the mathematical analysis for the calculation of the dispersion relation, the field distributions, and the ohmic losses for TE <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m,p</sub> modes in an infinite coaxial waveguide with a longitudinally corrugated insert. The method employed is based on an appropriate eigenfunction expansion, and its main advantage is the very fast convergence with a few spatial harmonics. The analysis is properly extended to include tapered cavities with varying, in respect to the z-coordinate, outer and/or inner radius. Numerical results are presented for several tapered cavity geometries and compared with already published methods

High-power gyrotron development at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe for fusion applications

In the first part of this paper, the status of the 140-GHz continuously operated gyrotrons with an output power of 1 MW for the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X will be described. With the first series tube, an output power of 1000 kW has been achieved in short pulse operation (milliseconds) with an electron beam current of 40 A, and of 1150 kW at 50 A. With a pulse length of 3 min limited by the available high-voltage (HV) power supply, an output power of 920 kW at an electron beam current of about 40 A with an efficiency of 45% and a mode purity of 97.5% has been obtained. At a reduced beam current of 29 A, an output power of 570 kW was measured with a pulse length of 1893 s without significant increase in tube pressure. The energy content of this pulse is almost 1.1 GJ. For the next fusion plasma device, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), gyrotrons with a higher output power of about 2 MW are desirable. In short-pulse experiments, the feasibility of the fabrication of coaxial cavity gyrotrons with an output power up to 2-MW, continuous wave (CW), has been demonstrated, and the information necessary for a technical design has been obtained. The development of a long-pulse 2-MW coaxial cavity gyrotron started within a European cooperation. In parallel to the design and fabrication of an industrial prototype gyrotron, a short-pulse preprototype gyrotron has been operated to verify the design of critical components. An output power of 1.2 MW with an efficiency of 20% has been achieved. The development of frequency tunable gyrotrons operating in the range from 105 to 140 GHz for stabilization of current driven plasma instabilities in fusion plasma devices (neoclassical tearing modes) is another task in the development of gyrotrons at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.

Theoretical investigation of an advanced launcher for a 2-MW 170-GHz TE/sub 34,19/ coaxial cavity gyrotron

This paper investigates the antenna waveguide (launcher), the main component of the quasi-optical mode converter of a 2-MW 170-GHz TE/sub 34,19/ coaxial cavity gyrotron, which is under development within the European Union. For coaxial gyrotrons operating in very high-order cavity modes like the TE/sub 34,19/, due to the ratio of the caustic to cavity radius of 0.323, the transformation of the high-order cavity mode into a nearly Gaussian distribution cannot be done as good as for gyrotron modes where the ratio of caustic to cavity radius is approximately 0.5. The simulation results for the TE/sub 34,19/ mode show that the average and peak values of the power density at the edges of the cuts of a conventional dimpled-wall launcher are approximately 32.3 W/cm/sup 2/ and 63.8, respectively, which will produce diffraction losses and reflection of power from the cuts. This paper reports on an advanced launcher for which average and peak values of power density of 1.9 and 5.4 W/cm/sup 2/ at the edges of the cuts are achieved, and a well-focused field at the aperture with a scalar Gaussian mode content of 94.8% is obtained.

ECH MW-level CW transmission line components suitable for ITER

Abstract The ECH transmission lines for ITER will require performance parameters not yet entirely demonstrated in ECH systems on present magnetic fusion energy machines. The key performance requirements for the main ITER transmission lines are operation at 1 MW for pulse lengths of 400–3600 s (essentially cw) at a frequency of 170 GHz. An additional consideration for transmission line performance is the possibility that ITER will use 2 MW coaxial cavity gyrotrons currently under development by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) and other European Associations and European tube industry. This paper addresses the progress made by General Atomics in the various transmission line components suitable for use on ITER. ITER design documents call for a corrugated waveguide inner diameter of 63.5 mm; many components have already been fabricated in this diameter, and those that have been made in other diameters (namely 31.75 and 88.9 mm) can readily be modified to a 63.5 mm i.d. design. In some cases, water-cooling must be added to present designs to remove heat deposited during cw operation of the components.

Are Coaxial Super Power Gyrotrons Feasible?

Limits on the power generated by coaxial gyrotrons are investigated. It is shown that among all the operating modes suggested recently for coaxial super power gyrotrons only modes with azimuthal index m lower than about 44 pass the spatial stochasticity test. Modes with higher azimuthal indices cannot be used as operating modes because gyrotron oscillations become chaotic in the azimuthal direction and efficiency is very low. It is argued that there exists a natural upper limit on power generated by gyrotrons which is about 4 MW.

Development of Multimegawatt Gyrotrons for Fusion Plasma Heating and Current Drive

High-frequency gyrotrons with high output power are mainly used for microwave heating and current drive in plasmas for thermonuclear fusion. The development of high-power gyrotrons in continuous wave (CW) operation has been in progress for several years in a joint collaboration between different European research centers and an industrial partner. The status of the development of the 140-GHz continuously operating gyrotrons with an output power of 1 MW for the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X will be described. An output power of 890 kW has been achieved with a pulse length of 3 min. limited by the available high-voltage power supply at an electron beam current of 40 A. At a reduced beam current of 27 A , an output power of 540 kW was measured with a pulse length of 939 s. For the next fusion plasma device international thermonuclear experimental reactor, gyrotrons with a higher output power of about 2 MW are desirable. In short-pulse experiments, the feasibility of fabrication of coaxial cavity gyrotrons with an output power up to 2 MW, CW, has been demonstrated, and the information necessary for a technical design has been obtained. An output power of 2.2 MW has been reached in stable operation (without mode competition). At the nominal output power of 1.5 MW an efficiency of 48% could be obtained with single-stage depressed collector. The development of frequency tunable gyrotrons operating in the range from 105 to 140 GHz for stabilization of current driven plasma instabilities in fusion plasma devices (neoclassical tearing modes) is another task in the development of gyrotrons at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe.

A 2 MW, 170 GHz coaxial cavity gyrotron - experimental verification of the design of main components

A 2 MW, CW, 170 GHz coaxial cavity gyrotron is under development in cooperation between European Research Institutions (FZK Karlsruhe, CRPP Lausanne, HUT Helsinki) and the European tube industry (TED, Velizy, France). The design of critical components has recently been examined experimentally at FZK Karlsruhe with a short pulse (∼ few ms) coaxial cavity gyrotron. This gyrotron uses the same cavity and the same quasioptical (q.o.) RF-output system as designed for the industrial prototype and a very similar electron gun.

The Propagation Constants of Higher-Order Modes in Coaxial Waveguides With Finite Conductivity

Overmoded coaxial waveguides have been used in coaxial gyrotrons as a key interaction structure. To achieve the required mode selectivity, the resistivity of the center conductor is properly chosen to damp unwanted modes. Considering attenuation due to conductor loss, this study employs the perturbational method to determine the propagation constants of higher-order modes in the coaxial waveguide. The validity of the theoretical model is confirmed by comparison with results obtained using the high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS). Moreover, the method proposed herein is applied to analyze the ohmic mode selection of the coaxial waveguide.

Development of a 2-MW, CW Coaxial Gyrotron at 70 GHz and Test Facility for ITER

In ITER, EC heating and current drive (H&CD) is foreseen not only as a principal auxiliary system for plasma heating and as assist for plasma start-up, but is considered essential in meeting the key requirement of neoclassical tearing mode (NTM) stabilisation, by localized current drive. In the reference ECH design, ITER requires a total of 20 MW/CW power at 170 GHz using gyrotrons with a unit power of 1 MW. A higher power per unit (2 MW/gyrotron) would result in a strong reduction of the cost of the whole ECRH system, and would also relax the room constraints on the launcher antenna design. In view of the capability of coaxial cavity gyrotrons demonstrated with short pulse experiments at FZK, the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA) has started in 2003 the development of an industrial 170 GHz 2 MW/CW coaxial cavity gyrotron, in a collaborative effort between European research associations CRPP/EPFL, FZK, TEKES and Thals Electron Devices (TED). The development plan includes three steps to reach successively 2 MW/1s, 2 MW/60s and finally 2 MW/CW operation. The procurement of the first prototype is in progress and it scheduled to be delivered during the first quarter of 2006. The experimental tests of the prototypes will be carried out at CRPP/EPFL, where an ITER relevant test facility is presently under construction and will be achieved during the second half of 2005. The test facility is designed to be flexible enough, allowing the possible commissioning of tubes with different characteristics, as well the tests of the launcher antenna at full performances.

Reflections in gyrotrons with radial output: Consequences for the ITER coaxial gyrotron

A theory describing the influence of reflections on operation of gyrotrons with radial output is presented. The theory is used for evaluating the effect of reflections on the operation of the 170 GHz ITER coaxial cavity gyrotron, which is under development in cooperation between EUROATOM Associations (CRPP Lausanne, FZK Karlsruhe, and HUT Helsinki) together with European tube industry (Thales Electron Devices, Velizy, France). It is shown that for optimally chosen external magnetic field value and electron beam radius, possible reflections do not change the final steady-state operation, which corresponds to generation of a 2.2 MW millimeter-wave power. The effect of deviation of the magnetic field and the beam radius from optimal values on the device operation is also studied.