Steady-state operation of a large-area high-power RF ion source for the neutral beam injector

A large-area high-power RF-driven ion source is being developed in Germany for the heating and current drive (H&CD) of an ITER device. Negative hydrogen ion sources are the major components of neutral beam injection systems in future large-scale fusion devices such as an the ITER and the DEMO. The first and the second long-pulse ion sources (LPIS-1 and LPIS-2) have been successfully developed with a magnetic-bucket plasma generator, including a filament heating structure for the first NBI (NBI-1) system of the KSTAR tokamak. A development plan exists for a large-area high-power RF ion source for steady-state operation (more than 300 seconds) at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) to extract positive ions, which can be used for the NBI heating and current drive systems, and to extract negative ions for future fusion devices such as a Fusion Neutron Source and Korea - DEMO. The RF ion source consists of a driver region, including a helical antenna and a discharge chamber, and an expansion region (magnetic bucket of the prototype LPIS-1). RF power can be transferred at up to 10 kW with a fixed frequency of 2 MHz through an optimized RF matching system. An actively water-cooled Faraday shield is located inside the driver region of the ion source for stable and steady-state operation of the RF discharge. The uniformities of the plasma parameters are measured at the lowest area of the expansion bucket by using two RF-compensated electrostatic probes along the directions of the short and the long dimensions of the expansion region.