Criticality in the fabrication of ion extraction system for SST-1 neutral beam injector

For the heating of plasma in steady-state superconducting tokamak (SST-1) (Y.C. Saxena, SST-1 Team, Present status of the SST-1 project, Nucl. Fusion 40 (2000) 1069–1082; D. Bora, SST-1 Team, Test results on systems developed for the SST-1 tokamak, Nucl. Fusion 43 (2003) 1748–1758), a neutral beam injector is provided to raise the ion temperature to ∼1keV. This injector has a capability of injecting hydrogen beam with the power of 0.5MW at 30keV. For the upgrade of SST-1, power of 1.7MW at 55KeV is required. Further, beam power is to be provided for a pulse length of 1000S. We have designed a neutral beam injector (S.K. Mattoo, A.K. Chakraborty, U.K. Baruah, P.K. Jayakumar, M. Bandyopadhyay, N. Bisai, Ch. Chakrapani, M.R. Jana, R. Onali, V. Prahlad, P.J. Patel, G.B. Patel, B. Prajapati, N.V.M. Rao, S. Rambabu, C. Rotti, S.K. Sharma, S. Shah, V. Sharma, M.J. Singh, Engineering design of the steady-state neutral beam injector for SST-1, Fusion Eng. Des. 56 (2001) 685–691; A.K. Chakraborty, N. Bisai, M.R. Jana, P.K. Jayakumar, U.K. Baruah, P.J. Patel, K. Rajasekar, S.K. Mattoo, Neutral beam injector for steady-state superconducting tokamak, Fusion Technol. (1996) 657–660; P.K. Jayakumar, M.R. Jana, N. Bisai, M. Bajpai, N.P. Singh, U.K. Baruah, A.K. Chakraborty, M. Bandyopadhyay, C. Chrakrapani, D. Patel, G.B. Patel, P. Patel, V. Prahlad, N.V.M. Rao, C. Rotti, V. Sreedhar, S.K. Mattoo, Engineering issues of a 1000S neutral beam ion source, Fusion Technol. 1 (1998) 419–422) satisfying the requirements for both SST-1 and its upgrade. Since intense power is to be transported to SST-1 situated at a distance of several meters from the ion source, the optical quality of the beam becomes a primary concern. This in turn, is determined by the uniformity of the ion source plasma and the extractor geometry. To obtain the desired optical quality of the beam, stringent tolerances are to be met during the fabrication of ion extractor system.