MW Of RF Power Research Articles

First high-power helicon results from DIII-D

Abstract More than 0.6 MW of rf power at 476 MHz has been coupled to DIII-D plasmas by launching helicon (whistler) waves with a traveling-wave antenna (comb-line) in the fast-wave polarization (Van Compernolle et al 2021 Nucl. Fusion 61 116034) which resulted in the observation of electron heating of the core plasma with single-pass absorption based on ray-tracing in L-mode discharges. The coupling performance of the 1.5 m wide 30-element comb-line traveling-wave antenna has been consistent with expectations based on the 2015–2016 experiments on DIII-D with a low-power 12-element prototype (Pinsker et al 2018 Nucl. Fusion 58 106007). The conditioning process that was necessary to carry out high-power experiments is discussed; rf-specific impurities have not been observed. Parametric decay instabilities have been observed and are being investigated as a potential edge absorption mechanism (Porkolab et al 2023 AIP Conf. Proc. 2984 070004).

Operating a full tungsten actively cooled tokamak: overview of WEST first phase of operation

WEST is an MA class superconducting, actively cooled, full tungsten (W) tokamak, designed to operate in long pulses up to 1000 s. In support of ITER operation and DEMO conceptual activities, key missions of WEST are: (i) qualification of high heat flux plasma-facing components in integrating both technological and physics aspects in relevant heat and particle exhaust conditions, particularly for the tungsten monoblocks foreseen in ITER divertor; (ii) integrated steady-state operation at high confinement, with a focus on power exhaust issues. During the phase 1 of operation (2017–2020), a set of actively cooled ITER-grade plasma facing unit prototypes was integrated into the inertially cooled W coated startup lower divertor. Up to 8.8 MW of RF power has been coupled to the plasma and divertor heat flux of up to 6 MW m−2 were reached. Long pulse operation was started, using the upper actively cooled divertor, with a discharge of about 1 min achieved. This paper gives an overview of the results achieved in phase 1. Perspectives for phase 2, operating with the full capability of the device with the complete ITER-grade actively cooled lower divertor, are also described.

Thermal Optimization of Functional Insertion Components (FIC) for Cryogenic Applications

Various functional insertion components (FIC), directly connecting a cold mass and the ambient environment, are irreplaceable and play crucial technical roles in many superconducting cryogenic applications. However, such components also bring a huge heat leak to the cold mass. The heat leak is usually much greater than that through entire evacuated MLI insulation system and solid support structures combined. Therefore, this situation brings unimaginable challenges not only to the refrigeration loads to be met but also critical aspects of the FIC design in satisfaction of highly restrictive, even contradicting technical functions. The FIC must simultaneously minimize the heat leak provide a large amounts of DC current and RF power to/from the cold mass, as well as provide a reliable ultrahigh vacuum thermal isolation break with strong mechanical stability. Reviewed are the following commonly used FICs: 1) various RF input couplers for transmitting MW-RF power; 2) high DC power current leads for energizing various SC magnets; 3) various high order mode (HOM) couplers for damping unwanted RF energy; 4) instrumentation cable/wire to cold mass. Approaches to efficiently minimize the DC current heating, RF surface heating, heat leak through the solid body of FIC, efficient cooling approaches, while reliably providing the technical functions, are briefly summarized and compared for select applications from around the world.

A high-power helicon antenna for the DIII-D tokamak and its electromagnetic aspects

A comb-line antenna to demonstrate efficient off-axis non-inductive current drive from the absorption of toroidally directed very high harmonic fast waves is being designed and built for DIII-D. The antenna consists of a toroidal array of 30 modules, spanning 1.7 m on the outer vessel wall just above the tokamak midplane. This antenna will be fed with 1 MW of RF power at 476 MHz through a stripline (SL) feed on both sides inside the vacuum vessel. COMSOL Multiphysics, a commercial finite element analysis software, was used to perform the RF analysis and the induced force analysis due to plasma disruption events on the whole antenna system. Results on the RF performance of the SL and the RF coupling into and between the modules, and the SL and modules’ RF losses will be presented. In addition, the disruption induced current and forces are shown, and a method to mitigate them is presented.

Conceptual design of CFETR ECRH equatorial launcher and upper launcher

The Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ECRH) system of China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is designed to inject 20 MW RF power into the plasma for heating and current drive (H&CD) applications. The ECRH system consists of 20 gyrotrons, the associated power supplies, the transmission lines and one launcher. In order to compare the launcher performance from equatorial and upper ports, two types of launcher are designed in this paper. In equatorial launcher (EL), twenty in-vessel transmission lines are divided into four groups. Every five gaussian beams from in-vessel transmission lines face one fixed focusing mirror and one steering mirror. All gaussian beams are injected into the plasma with optimal toroidal and poloidal angles calculated by C3PO/LUKE code. In upper launcher (UL), twenty-one transmission lines are supposed and divides into three groups. Every seven gaussian beams are injected into one fixed focusing mirrors and all twenty-one beams reflected to one common steering mirror finally. The optical transmission characteristics and the convergence information of gaussian beams are checked and optimized. The EL or UL is installed on the equatorial or upper port with a port-plug modular structure.

Status of the RFQ linac installation and conditioning of the Linear IFMIF Prototype Accelerator

The Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) linac and 1.6 MW RF power system of the Linear IFMIF Prototype Accelerator (LIPAc) facility in the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC) in Rokkasho (Japan) has been installed and conditioned. During the assembly and tuning process, the RFQ cavity was protected with a temporary tent from the potential deterioration of performance caused by dust. The vacuum in the cavity was improved through the 100 °C baking process of the cavity. The high power test of the 175 MHz RF systems up to 200 kW in CW for each of the eight RF chains was performed for checking its stable output reproducibility in Japan, before connecting 9–3/16 inch coaxial transmission lines from the RF chains to the RF input couplers of the cavity. It was confirmed that the eight RF chains provided the balanced RF power to the single RFQ cavity in-phase using a feedback loop and a synchronization system. The peak power in the cavity achieved 150 kW in the pulsed mode, which corresponds approximately to the required electric field to accelerate proton beam. Such RF conditioning process is ongoing to achieve 600 kW approximately required for deuteron beam commissioning planned in 2018.

Design and Development of Amplitude and phase measurement of RF signal with Digital I-Q Demodulator

ITER-India, working as a nodal agency from India for ITER project [1], is responsible to deliver one of the packages, called Ion Cyclotron Heating & Current Drive (ICH&CD) - Radio Frequency Power Sources (RFPS). RFPS is having two cascaded amplifier chains (10 kW, 130 kW & 1.5 MW) combined to get 2.5 MW RF power output. Directional couplers are inserted at the output of each stage to extract forward power and reflected power as samples for measurement of amplitude and phase. Using passive mixer, forward power and reflected power are down converted to 1MHz Intermediate frequency (IF). This IF signal is used as an input to the Digital IQ Demodulator (DIQDM). DIQDM is realized using National Instruments make PXI hardware & LabVIEW software tool. In this paper, Amplitude and Phase measurement of RF signal with DIQDM technique is described. Also test results with dummy signals and signal generated from low power RF systems is discussed here.

Parametric Instabilities During High Power Helicon Wave Injection on DIII-D

High power helicon (whistler) waves at a frequency of 0.47 GHz are being considered for efficient off-axis current generation in high performance DIII-D plasmas and in K-Star [3]. The need for deploying helicon waves for current profile control has been noted in previous publications since penetration to the core of reactor grade plasmas is easier than with lower hybrid slow waves (LHCD) which suffer from accessibility limitations and strong electron Landau absorption in fusion grade high temperature plasmas. In this work we show that under typical experimental conditions in present day tokamaks with 1 MW of RF power coupled per antenna, the associated perpendicular electric fields of the order of 40 kV/m can drive strong parametric decay instabilities near the lower hybrid layer. The EXB and polarization drift velocities which are the dominant driver of the PDI can be comparable to the speed of sound in the outer plasma layers, a key measure of driving PDI instabilities. Here we calculate growth rates and convective thresholds for PDIs, and we find that decay waves into hot ion lower hybrid waves and ion cyclotron quasi modes dominate in the vicinity of the lower hybrid layer, possibly leading to pump depletion. Such instabilities in future reactor grade high temperature plasmas are less likely.

DIII-D Electron Cyclotron Heating System Status and Upgrades

The DIII-D electron cyclotron heating (ECH) system consists of six 110-GHz gyrotrons with corrugated coaxial 31.75-mm waveguide transmission lines, and steerable launching mirrors. The system has been gradually updated, leading to an increased experimental flexibility and a high system reliability of 91% in the past year. Operationally, the gyrotrons can generate up to a total of 4.8 MW of RF power for pulses up to 5 seconds. The maximum ECH energy injected into the DIII-D is 16.6 MJ. The HE1,1 mode content is over 85% for all the lines, and the transmission coefficient is better than −1.1 dB for all the transmission lines, close to the theoretical value. A new depressed collector gyrotron was recently installed and was injected up to 640 kW of power into the plasma during 2014–2015 tokamak operations. Four dual waveguide launchers, which can steer the RF beams ±20° poloidally and toroidally, are used for real-time neoclassical tearing mode control and suppression. The launchers now have increased poloidal scanning speed and beam positioning accuracy of approximately ±2 mm at the plasma center. Two more gyrotrons are expected to be installed and operational in 2015–2016. The first is a repaired 110-GHz, 1-MW gyrotron that had a gun failure after more than 11 years of operation at DIII-D. The second is a newly designed depressed collector tube in the 1.5 MW class, operating at 117.5 GHz, manufactured by Communications and Power Industries.

Characteristics of a four element gyromagnetic nonlinear transmission line array high power microwave source.

In this paper, a solid-state four element array gyromagnetic nonlinear transmission line high power microwave system is presented as well as a detailed description of its subsystems and general output capabilities. This frequency agile S-band source is easily adjusted from 2-4 GHz by way of a DC driven biasing magnetic field and is capable of generating electric fields of 7.8 kV/m at 10 m correlating to 4.2 MW of RF power with pulse repetition frequencies up to 1 kHz. Beam steering of the array at angles of ±16.7° is also demonstrated, and the associated general radiation pattern is detailed.

ICRF antenna matching systems with ferrite tuners for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak

Real-time fast ferrite tuning (FFT) has been successfully implemented on the ICRF antennas on Alcator C-Mod. The former prototypical FFT system on the E-port 2-strap antenna has been upgraded using new ferrite tuners. A new FFT system with two ferrite tuners and one fixed-length stub has been installed on the transmission line of the D-port 2-strap antenna. These two systems are able to achieve and maintain the reflected power to the transmitters to less than 1% in real time under almost all plasma conditions and help ensure reliable high power operation of the antennas. The loading insensitivity feature vs. plasma conditions of the innovative field-aligned (FA) 4-strap antenna on the J-port allows us to significantly improve the matching by installing a carefully designed stub on each of the two transmission lines. The reduction of the RF voltages in the transmission lines has enabled the J-port FA antenna to deliver 3.7MW RF power to plasmas out of 4MW source power. The matching on the J-port antenna can be further improved by adding a single ferrite tuner under real-time control on each transmission line and this scheme will be implemented in the near future.

Mixers of Ultra-High Gain from 5.0 to 18.0 GHz

Mixers in the communication system provide the possibility of encoding and decoding radio-frequency EM waves with signals through the help of local oscillators. A mixer with capability of high conversion gain, good isolation, and good linearity is comparably appreciated. Extensively wide ranges of frequencies, from 5.0 to 18.0 GHz, are to be examined addressing the promising functions of mixers in this study. A TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS model implanted in Agilent ADS is used for the circuit designs. Generated from Gilbert Cell Mixer, the modified circuits take advantage of extra active and passive devices to optimize the conversion gains. Characteristics of high conversion gain over 20 dB or even higher (as high as 29.842 dB at -40 mW RF power at working frequency 6 GHz) and low noise figures (NF) are shown.

High-power microwave attenuator employing slow wave structure

Using present pulsed microwave amplifier, we can obtain RF peak power beyond one hundred MW. However, it is not easy to test such a high-power RF. To overcome this difficulty we developed a high-power microwave attenuator employing a slow wave structure.For example, the output power of RF pulse compressor for present electron linear accelerator reaches a few hundreds MW RF power, but the existing dummy loads can absorb only a few tens MW of RF power.The attenuator we developed has a kind of periodic structure and is made of metal only. We operated this attenuator using a high-power RF source, and found that it could be operated fewer than 50pps RF output at 40MW, 2.5μs or 100MW, 0.5μs.

Overview of the ITER EC H&CD system and its capabilities

The Electron Cyclotron (EC) system for the ITER tokamak is designed to inject ≥20 MW RF power into the plasma for Heating and Current Drive (H&CD) applications. The EC system consists of up to 26 gyrotrons (between 1 and 2 MW each), the associated power supplies, 24 transmission lines and 5 launchers. The EC system has a diverse range of applications including central heating and current drive, current profile tailoring and control of plasma magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities such as the sawtooth and neoclassical tearing modes (NTMs). This diverse range of applications requires the launchers to be capable of depositing the EC power across nearly the entire plasma cross section. This is achieved by two types of antennas: an equatorial port launcher (capable of injecting up to 20 MW from the plasma axis to mid-radius) and four upper port launchers providing access from inside of mid radius to near the plasma edge. The equatorial launcher design is optimized for central heating, current drive and profile tailoring, while the upper launcher should provide a very focused and peaked current density profile to control the plasma instabilities. The overall EC system has been modified during the past 3 years taking into account the issues identified in the ITER design review from 2007 and 2008 as well as integrating new technologies. This paper will review the principal objectives of the EC system, modifications made during the past 2 years and how the design is compliant with the principal objectives.

Engineering evolution of the FAST machine

FAST (Fusion Advanced Studies Torus) is a proposal for a Satellite Facility which can contribute the rapid exploitation of ITER and prepare ITER and DEMO regimes of operation, as well as exploit innovative plasma facing component systems for DEMO. FAST is a compact (Ro = 1.82 m, a = 0.64 m, triangularity δ = 0.4) and cost effective machine able to investigate, with integration capability, non linear dynamics effects of alpha particle behaviour in burning plasmas. FAST operates in high performance H-mode ( B T up to 8.5 T; I P up to 8 MA), as well as in advanced tokamak mode ( I P = 3 MA), and in full non inductive current mode ( I P = 2 MA). Helium gas at 30 K is used for cooling the resistive copper magnets. This allows for a pulse duration up to 170 s at 3 MA/3.5 T. The vacuum vessel (VV), segmented into 20-degree modules, is capable to accommodate a 40 MW RF power system. The machine has been designed to house a 10 MW Negative Neutral Beam Injection (NNBI) system. Tungsten (W) or liquid lithium (L-Li) have been chosen as the divertor plate materials, and argon or neon as the impurities to be injected for mitigating the thermal loads.

MITIGATION OF RF GUN BREAKDOWN BY REMOVAL OF TUNING RODS IN HIGH FIELD REGIONS

The π-mode resonant frequency of the 1.6 cell SLAC/BNL/UCLA style RF photoinjector electron gun is conventionally tuned using cylindrical copper tuning pieces that extend into the full-cell cavity through holes in the side of the gun. This design begins to fail in many versions of this popular gun design at higher voltage levels, when the cavity undergoes electric breakdown in the vicinity of the tuners. In order to remove the tuners from the region of high electric field, mitigating this problem, one must change the full cell geometry significantly. We have investigated a method for accomplishing this, in which we stretch the gun structure to tune the resonant frequency up by over 2 MHz. We constructed a device to perform this stretching and tested the modified photoinjector in an RF test bed. We succeeded in putting approximately 8.4 MW of RF power into the gun, an improvement over the 4 MW routinely achieved with a similar gun using conventional tuning methods installed at the UCLA Neptune laboratory. Recent results in testing this gun with a magnesium cathode insert are reported as well.

A novel 440 MHz wireless SAW microsensor integrated with pressure–temperature sensors and ID tag

This paper presents the development of a 440 MHz range surface acoustic wave (SAW)-based microsensor integrated with pressure–temperature sensors and ID tag. Two piezoelectric substrates were bonded, in which a ∼150 µm air gap was structured by metal poles. The pressure sensor was placed on the top substrate, whereas the ID tag and temperature sensor were located on the bottom substrate. Coupling of modes (COM) modeling was used to find optimal design parameters. Using the extracted optimal design parameters, the SAW device was fabricated. In wireless device testing using a network analyzer, sharp reflection peaks with high S/N ratio, small signal attenuation and small spurious peaks were observed in the time domain. All the reflection peaks were well matched with the predicted values from the simulation. With 10 mW RF power from the network analyzer, a ∼1 m readout distance was observed. Depending on applied external pressure, the phase shifts of the reflection peaks were linearly varied. The evaluated sensitivity was about ∼2.9° kPa−1. Eight sharp ON reflection peaks were observed for the ID tag. The temperature sensor was characterized from 20 °C to 200 °C. A large phase shift per unit temperature change was observed.

Design criteria and current status of LHCD system on SST1 machine

The lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) system for superconducting steady state tokamak-1 (SST-1) machine is in advanced stage of integration and commissioning. The system is designed to launch 1 MW of RF power at a frequency of 3.7 GHz to sustain 220 kA of plasma current non-inductively for 1000 s. The system employs a conventional grill antenna (having 2 × 32 waveguides), vacuum and air transmission lines and high power source system. A new design for vacuum transmission line, which enables better vacuum and RF compatibility has been successfully executed and tested. The transition from the narrow waveguide to WR284 waveguide system is achieved through a simple design, having stacks of copper plates with the waveguides milled in them, referred as transforming module and is successfully tested for mechanical, vacuum and RF performance. Many of the critical components have been successfully fabricated and tested as per the designs. The components and sub-systems are made ready and the integration is in progress. All the components are actively cooled and are compatible with 1000 s operation.The performance tests and current status of various sub assemblies and partially integrated LHCD system is discussed in detail in this paper.

Development of a KSTAR ICRF antenna for long pulse operation

A prototype ion cyclotron range of frequency (ICRF) antenna with RF power of 6 MW has been developed for the long pulse (300 s), high power operation in the Korea superconducting tokamak advanced research (KSTAR) tokamak. Cooling paths in the antenna were carefully designed to remove the dissipated RF power loss. An RF power test has been performed to estimate the standoff capability of the antenna. A high power RF test at a frequency of 30 MHz gives a standoff voltage of 30.5 kVp for 60 s and 23.2 kVp for 300 s (without cooling). During the RF pulse, the peak voltage, forward/reflected powers, temperature of the antenna, and gas pressure are measured. A vacuum feedthrough of 1 MW RF power has been developed, which has two alumina ceramic cylinders and an O-ring seal. For cooling of the ceramic parts, dry air is injected into the ceramic surface through two outer nozzles. Independent cooling water channels are installed to cool the inner conductor of the feedthrough. RF high voltage tests show that stable operation is possible, with a peak voltage of 28.9 kVp for 300 s, without any severe damage.

Development of High Power RF Transmission Components for Long Pulse Operation

The high power RF transmission components are developed for transmitting MW level of RF power continuously in ICRF heating and current drive system. A water-cooled co-axial transmission line with the special connector for water sealing while maintaining electrical contact, a vacuum feedthrough of 1 MW RF power which. has two alumina (Al2O3, 97%) ceramic cylinders and O-ring seal instead of a brazed seal for good mechanical and thermal strength, and the phase shifter using liquid instead of gas for insulating dielectric medium were developed. RF tests show that stable operation is possible with the peak voltage over 30 kV for 300 seconds.