ICONE19-43983 An Engineering Approach to the Design and Construction of a Small Modular Stellarator for Magnetic Confinement of Plasma : SCR-1

Abstract

This paper briefly describes the design and construction of Stellarator of Costa Rica 1 (SCR-1) from an engineering perspective. SCR-1 is a small modular Stellarator for magnetic confinement of plasma developed by the Plasma Physics Group of the Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica (ITCR). The SCR-1 is based on the small Spanish Stellarator UST_1 (Ultra Small Torus 1), created by engineer Vicente Queral [1]. Some of the characteristics of the SCR-1 are the following: it will be a 2-field period modular stellarator with an aspect ratio &ap; 6; low shear configuration with core and edge rotational transform equal to 0.32 and 0.28; it will employ stainless steel torus-shaped vacuum vessel which will hold a plasma with an average radius a &ap; 42.2 mm, a volume of 8 liters (0.008 m^3), and major radius R=238 mm. This plasma will be confined by a magnetic field (B &ap; 90 mT) given by 12 modular coils with 12 turns each, carrying a current of 725 A per turn providing a total toroidal field (TF) current of 8.7 kA-turn per coil. The coils will be supplied by a bank of cell batteries of 120 V. Typical length of the plasma pulse will be between 4 s to 10 s. The plasma heating will be achieved by electron cyclotron radio-frequency (ECH) from two magnetrons providing a total power of 5kW, at a frequency of 2.45GHz corresponding to the first harmonic (B_0=87.8 mT). The expected electron temperature and density are 15 eV and 7×10^<16> m^<-3> respectively. The initial diagnostics on the SCR-1 will consist of a Langmuir probe with a displacement system, a heterodyne microwave interferometer (frequency of 28 GHz, corresponding to a wavelength of λ=10.71 mm). The first plasma of the SCR-1 is expected at the beginning of 2012.