Overview of recent developments in pellet injection for ITER

Pellet injection is the primary fueling technique planned for core fueling of ITER burning plasmas. Also, the injection of relatively small pellets to purposely trigger rapid small edge localized modes (ELMs) has been proposed as a possible solution to the heat flux damage from larger natural ELMs likely to be an issue on the ITER divertor surfaces. The ITER pellet injection system is designed to inject pellets into the plasma through both inner and outer wall guide tubes. The inner wall guide tubes will provide high throughput pellet fueling while the outer wall guide tubes will be used primarily to trigger ELMs at a high frequency (>15 Hz). The pellet fueling rate of each injector is to be up to 120 Pa m(3)/s, which will require the formation of solid D-T at a volumetric rate of similar to 1500 mm(3)/s. Two injectors are to be provided for ITER at the startup with a provision for up to six injectors during the D-T phase. The required throughput of each injector is greater than that of any injector built to date, and a novel twin-screw continuous extrusion system is being developed to meet the challenging design parameters. Status of the development activities is presented, highlighting recent progress. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.