Present status of the negative ion based NBI system for long pulse operation on JT-60U

Ikeda, Yoshitaka; Umeda, Naotaka; Akino, Noboru; Ebisawa, Noboru; Grisham, L. R.*; Hanada, Masaya; Honda, Atsushi; Inoue, Takashi; Kawai, Mikito; Kazawa, Minoru; et al.

Nuclear Fusion, 46(6), p.S211 - S219, 2006/06

https://doi.org/10.1088/0029-5515/46/6/S02

Recently, the extension of the pulse duration up to 30 sec has been intended to study quasi-steady state plasma on JT-60U N-NBI system. The most serious issue is to reduce the heat load on the grids for long pulse operation. Two modifications have been proposed to reduce the heat load. One is to suppress the beam spread which may be caused by beamlet-beamlet interaction in the multi-aperture grid due to the space charge force. Thin plates were attached on the extraction grid to modify the local electric field. The plate thickness was optimized to steer the beamlet deflection. The other is to reduce the stripping loss, where the electron of the negative ion beam is stripped and accelerated in the ion source and then collides with the grids. The ion source was modified to reduce the pressure in the accelerator column to suppress the beam-ion stripping loss. Up to now, long pulse injection of 17 sec for 1.6 MW and 25 sec for 1 MW has been obtained by one ion source with these modifications.