Electron cyclotron heating assisted start-up experiments in J-TEXT

¹ International Joint Research Laboratory of Magnetic confinement Fusion and Plasma Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, People’s Republic of China
² ITER Organization, Route de Vinon sur Verdon, CS 90 046, 13067 St Paul Lez Durance, France
³ Institute of Advanced Energy, Kyoto University, Uji, Japan
⁴ School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

^* e-mail: xiadh@hust.edu.cn
^** See the author list of “Y. Liang et al. 2019 Overview of the Recent Experimental Research on the J-TEXT Tokamak, Nucl. Fusion 59 112016”

Published online: 23 February 2023

Abstract

Electron cyclotron heating (ECH) breakdown and burn-through assist has been adopted to make the ITER start-up, which uses a low toroidal electric field of about 0.3 V/m, more robust. Related studies have been carried out on many fusion machines such as DIII-D, JT-60U, Tore Supra and FTU. However, the required ECH power to ensure an effective breakdown assist at ITER is not yet clear. Experiment was also performed in J-TEXT to determine the minimum ECH power requirements to assist breakdown and develop a better physics description of the process. The breakdown loop voltage for a successful shot was reduced from 34 to 3.7 V (corresponding to 0.56 V/m) by 300 kW X2-mode ECH power. The critical ECH power to assist the successful formation of a tokamak discharge is about 200kW, and below this value, ionization caused by ECH power is observed, however, the tokamak discharge start-up does not succeed. The effect of different loop voltages and ECH pulse-width on start-up was also studied. As injecting ECH power at a proper time, low ECH power can achieve a similar pre-ionization result as the case with high power. Extremely low breakdown voltage leads to a higher toroidal field later when putting a capacity to continue discharging in J-TEXT. The earlier shutdown of ECH power caused a failed discharge.