Commissioning of 170 GHz, 1 MW EC H&CD in KSTAR

¹ National Fusion Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea
² Department of Physics, POSTECH, Pohang, Korea
³ Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Naka, Japan
⁴ Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, USA
⁵ General Atomics, San Diego, USA

Abstract

The newly installed electron cyclotron heating and current drive (EC H&CD) system with a frequency of 170 GHz was successfully commissioned and used for the second-harmonic ECH-assisted startup in 2011 operational campaign of the KSTAR. As a RF power source, ITER pre-prototype of 170 GHz, 1 MW continuous-wave gyrotron, is loaned from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). During the KSTAR 2011 plamma campaign, maxumum pulse length of 10 sec at 0.6 MW EC beam was reliably injected into the plasma and the 170 GHz second harmonic ECH-assisted start-up was successful leading to reduce the flux consumption at toroidal magnetic field of 3 T. As a result, the flux consumption until the plasma current flat-top was reduced from 4.13 Wb for pure Ohmic to 3.62 Wb (12 % reduction) for the perpendicular injection. When the EC beam is launched with toroidal angle of 20 deg in co-CD direction, more reduced magnetic flux consumption was obtained with 3.14 Wb (24 % reduction) compared with pure OH plasmas. In recent, the gyrotron has been successfully commissioned with the output power of 1 MW and the pulse duration of 20 sec in KSTAR. This paper presents successful commissioning of 170 GHz EC H&CD system in KSTAR as well as the heating and startup experimental results.