Development Strategy of RF Ion Source for Neutral Beam Injector in Fusion Devices

Large-area RF-driven ion source is being developed at Germany for the heating and current drive of ITER device [1, 2]. Negative hydrogen ion sources are major components of neutral beam injection systems in future large-scale fusion experiments such as ITER and DEMO. RF sources for the production of positive hydrogen ions have been successfully developed at IPP (Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics), Garching, for the ASDEX Upgrade and the W7-AS neutral beam heating systems [3, 4]. In recent, the first NBI system (NBI-1) has been developed successfully for the KSTAR device [5, 6]. The first long-pulse ion source (LPIS-1) consists of a magnetic bucket plasma generator with multi-pole cusp fields, filament heating structure, and a set of prototype tetrode accelerators with circular apertures. There is a development plan of RF ion source at the KAERI to extract the positive ions, which can be used for the second NBI system (NBI-2) of KSTAR and to extract the negative ions for future fusion devices such as ITER and K-DEMO. The development strategy and processes are described in this presentation.