ECRH/EBWH system for NSTX-U

Abstract

The National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade (NSTX-U) will operate at an axial toroidal field of up to 1 T, about twice the field available on NSTX. A 28 GHz electron cylotron resonance heating (ECRH) system is currently being planned for NSTX-U. A 1 MW 28 GHz gyrotron will be employed. Intially the system will use short, 10-50 ms, 1 MW pulses for ECRH-assisted discharge start-up. Later the pulse length will be extended to 1-5 s to study electron Bernstein wave heating (EBWH) during the plasma current flat top. A mirror launcher will be used to couple microwave power to the plasma via O-mode to the slow X-mode to EBW (O-X-B) double mode conversion. This paper presents a pre-conceptual design for the ECRH/EBWH system proposed for NSTX-U and includes ray tracing and Fokker-Planck modeling results for 28 GHz ECRH during plasma start-up and EBW heating and current drive during the plasma current flattop of a NSTX-U advanced H-mode plasma scenario. © Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2012.