Feasibility study of neutral beam injection in Thailand Tokamak-1

Thailand Institute of Nuclear Technology (TINT) is developing Thailand- 1 (TT-1) from a former device HT-6 M of China. The first hydrogen plasma will be initiated in 2023. To investigate high-β plasma and physics related to fast ions, TT-1 will be equipped with auxiliary heating systems. In this work, a feasibility study for installing a neutral beam injection (NBI) heating system in TT-1 is carried out. This work is motivated to characterize beam ion\u27s orbits in different injection angles and to explore a condition suitable in terms of higher heating efficiency. In this work, we assume that a hydrogen beam will be launched into the TT-1 plasma with an acceleration voltage of 20 kV. The orbit simulations using the gyromotion following code LORBIT are performed in various magnetic field equilibria, i.e., different plasma current (Ip), toroidal magnetic field strength (Bt), and the magnetic axis (Rax). Furthermore, beam ions are injected in different directions, i.e., tangential co-injection and tangential counter-injection. In the case of co-injection, beam ion loss is not significant, by about 6%, whereas beam ion loss fraction is evaluated to be 26–34% in the case of counter-injection. Also, it is found that the number of lost beam ions is significantly affected by changing Ip and Rax. The results obtained in this work will directly support the experiment plan for the high-performance plasmas, design of the fast-ion diagnostic system, and systematic understanding of beam ion\u27s confinement property and beam-ion-driven magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in TT-1

On benchmarking of simulations of particle transport in ITER

We report results of benchmarking of core particle transport simulations by a collection of codes widely used in transport modelling of tokamak plasmas. Our analysis includes formulation of transport equations, difference between electron and ion solvers, comparison of modules of the pellet and edge gas fuelling on the ITER baseline scenario. During the first phase of benchmarking we address the particle transport effects in the stationary phase. Firstly, simulations are performed with identical sources, sinks, transport coefficients, and boundary conditions prescribed in the flattop H-mode phase. The transformation of ion particle transport equations is introduced so to directly compare their results to electron transport solvers. Secondly, the pellet fuelling models are benchmarked in various conditions to evaluate the dependency of the pellet deposition on the pellet volume, injection side, pedestal, and separatrix parameters. Thirdly, edge gas fuelling is benchmarked to assess sensitivities of source profile predictions to uncertainties in plasma conditions and detailed model assumptions. At the second phase, we address particle transport effects in the time- evolving plasma including the current ramp-up to the ramp-down phase. The ion and the electron solvers are benchmarked together. Differences between the simulation results of the solvers are investigated in terms of equilibrium, grid resolution, radial coordinate, radial grid distribution, and plasma volume evolution term. We found that the selection of the radial coordinate can yield prominent differences between the solvers mainly due to differences in the edge grid distribution. The simulations reveal that electron and ion solvers predict noticeably different density peaking for the same diffusion and pinch velocity while with the peaked profile of helium, expected in fusion reactors. The fuelling benchmarking shows that gas puffing is not efficient for core fuelling in H-modes and density control should be done by the high field side pellet injection in contrast to present machines