Performance Test Results of Ion Beam Transport for SST-1 Neutral Beam Injector

A neutral beam injector is built at IPR to heat the plasma of SST-1 and its upgrade. It delivers a maximum beam power of 1.7 MW for 55 kV Hydrogen beam or 80 kV Deuterium beam. At lower beam voltage, the delivered power falls to 500 kW at 30 kV Hydrogen beam which is adequate to heat SST-1 plasma ions to similar to 1 keV. Process of acceleration of ions to the required beam voltage, conversion of ions to neutrals and removal of unneutralized ions and the beam diagnostic systems occupy a large space. The consequence is that linear extent of the neutral beam injector is at least a few meters. Also, port access provides a very narrow duct. Even a very good injector design and fabrication practices keep beam divergence at a very low but finite value. The result is beam transport becomes an important issue. Since a wide area beam is constructed by hundreds of beam lets, it becomes essential they be focused in such a way that beam transport loss is minimized. Horizontal and vertical focal lengths are two parameters, in addition to beam divergence, which give a description of the beam transport. We have obtained these two parameters for our injector by using beam transport code; making several hundred simulation runs by varying optical parameters of the beam. The selected parameters set has been translated into the engineering features of the extractor grid set of the ion source. Aperture displacement technique is used to secure the horizontal beam focusing at 5.4 m. Combination of both aperture displacement and inclining of two grid halves to similar to 17 mrad are secured for vertical beam focusing at 7 m from earth grid of the ion source. The gaps between the design, engineered and performance tested values usually arise due to lack of exercising control over fabrication processes or due to inaccuracies in the assumption made in the model calculations of beam optics and beam transport. This has been the case with several injectors, notably with JET injector. To overcome this problem, we have validated and scaled our design calculations with performance parameters of the Neutral Beam Injector at IPP, Julich, Germany. The performance test of the SST-1 PINI ion source was done at MARION Test Stand at IPP, Julich. Analyses of these results indicate that the measured power profile and the optical parameters of the beam are in good agreement with the simulation results. These parameters are stable over the beam pulse of 14s with extracted beam energy of 31 MJ at 41 kV. This paper presents these results and details out future work need to be done in order to assess the steady state stability of the beam parameters.