Modeling of neutral beam injection heating and current drive during the ramp-up phase in KSTAR

For flexible control of the plasma pressure and the current profiles, which are essential for a high performance plasma with long pulse operation, KSTAR is going to implement several heating and current systems, which include Neutral Beam Injection (NBI), Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heting (ICRH)/Fast Wave Current Drive (FWCD), Lower Hybrid Current Drive (LHCD), and Eclectron Cyclotron Heating (ECH)/Electron Cyclotron Current Drive (ECCD). Here, the NBI system is typically used for the central heating and current drive. For the time being, only one NBI device (composed of 3 sources) is available in KSTAR. The first two sources were successfully commissioned in 2010 and 2013. The last source will be installed in 2014. In this work, we present a simulation study of the heating and current drive of the first NBI system (3 sources) during the ramp-up phase. We consider two different NBI configurations (low and high beam energy). The simulation is performed with NUBEAM, a well-recognized Monte-Carlo code. Several different types of KSTAR target equilibria (scan from lower to higher plasma density) are used for the calculation of the current drive, the heating and the different NB losses (shinethrough, charge exchange and bad orbit). The study shows the dependency of those quantities on the plasma density, the position of the NB source and the beam energy. It also shows that because of the shinethrough loss is too high, each NB source cannot be used when the plasma density is under a certain threshold. This study can be used to determine the starting time of the different NB sources during the KSTAR ramp-up phase.