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The ITER Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) system is designed to couple to the plasma 20 MW of RF power from two antennas in the 40-55 MHz frequency range during long pulses of up to 3600 s and under various plasma conditions with Edge Localized Modes. Radio-Frequency (RF) contacts are integrated within the ITER ICRH launcher in order to ensure the RF current continuity and ease the mechanical assembly by allowing the free thermal expansion of the Removable Vacuum Transmission Line coaxial conductors during RF operations or during 250{\textdegree}C baking phases. A material study has been carried out to determine which materials and associated coatings are relevant for RF contacts application in ITER. In parallel, RF tests have been performed with a new prototype of Multi-Contact (r) LA-CUT/0,25/0 contacts made of silver-coated CuCrZr louvers. During these tests on a RF vacuum resonator, currents between 1.2 kA and 1.3 kA peak have been reached a few tens of times in steady-state conditions without any visible damage on the louvers. A final 62MHz pulse ending in a 300s flat top at 1.9kA resulted in severe damage to the contact. In addition, a test bed which performs sliding test cycles has been built in order to reproduce the wear of the contact prototype after 30 000 sliding cycles on a 3 mm stroke at 175{\textdegree}C under vacuum. The silver coating of the louvers is removed after approximately a hundred cycles whilst, to the contrary, damage to the CuCrZr louvers is relatively low., Fusion Engineering and Design, Elsevier, A Para{\^i}tre

Embedded RF contacts are integrated within the ITER ICRH launcher to allow assembling, sliding and to lower the thermo-mechanical stress. They have to withstand a peak RF current up to 2.5 kA at 55 MHz in steady-state conditions, in the vacuum environment of themachine.The contacts have to sustain a temperature up to 250{\textdegree}Cduring several days in baking operations and have to be reliable during the whole life of the launcher without degradation. The RF contacts are critical components for the launcher performance and intensive R&D is therefore required, since no RF contactshave so far been qualified at these specifications. In order to test and validate the anticipated RF contacts in operational conditions, CEA has prepared a test platform consisting of a steady-state vacuum pumped RF resonator. In collaboration with ITER Organization and the CYCLE consortium (CYclotronCLuster for Europe), an R&D program has been conducted to develop RF contacts that meet the ITER ICRH launcher specifications. A design proposed by CYCLE consortium, using brazed lamellas supported by a spring to improve thermal exchange efficiency while guaranteeing high contact force, was tested successfully in the T-resonator up to 1.7 kA during 1200 s, but failed for larger current values due to a degradation of the contacts. Details concerning the manufacturing of the brazed contacts on its titanium holder, the RF tests results performed on the resonator and the non-destructive tests analysis of the contacts are given in this paper., Comment: Fusion Engineering and Design, Elsevier, 2015, Available online 21 April 2015

The WEST (Tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) is an upgrade of Tore-Supra (TS) which aims it into an X -point magnetic configuration tokamak equipped with an actively cooled tungsten divertor. To be a platform of ITER technologies of high heat flux components testing, three sets of Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH) antennas have been designed to inject 9 MW during 30 s or 3 MW during 1000 s. The antenna design is based on a load resilient prototype successfully tested in Tore Supra in 2007. In order to allow continuous-wave (CW) operations, the mechanical design of the WEST ICRH antenna is emphasized on its cooling performances by designing fully active cooling structure. Two kinds of cooling water loops are used, with temperature and pressure of 70 °C/30 bar and 25 °C/5.2 bar, respectively. The hot water loop is used for the Faraday screen (FS) and the housing box (HB), while the cold water loop is used for the straps, the matching capacitors and the impedance transformer. To enhance the heat removal ability and control the pressure drop, the cooling channels in the FS and HB are drilled directly and parallel connected as much as possible. By performing the hydraulic–thermal analysis, the lack of cooling efficiency was found in the front face of lateral collector where 1 MW/m 2 is imposed and fluid dead zones were found in some of the bars. After optimization, the cooling performance of the cooling circuit increased significantly. With a mass flow rate of 2.5 kg/s, the total pressure drop is 3.1 bar, and the peak temperatures on the FS and HB are 500 °C and 261 °C, respectively. Besides, no cavitation is found in the total cooling circuit.

29th Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT), Prague, CZECH REPUBLIC, SEP 05-09, 2016; International audience; One of the key missions of the Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (IRCH) system for WEST is to provide sufficient RF heating power in order to obtain a heat flux on the divertor target of 10 MW/m(2) during 1000 s and 20 MW/m(2) during a few tens of seconds. Based on the experience acquired in Tore Supra, the ICRH system has been upgraded for long pulse operation and Edge Localized Modes (ELM) resilience. To achieve this performance, three antennas have been designed through a European collaboration and are now under fabrication at CAS/ASIPP, at the Keye Company, Hefei, in China, within the framework of the Associated Laboratory IRFM-ASIPP. This paper describes the electrical and mechanical design of the antenna, together with the main manufacturing steps and leak test procedure used for validating the water-cooled components. Accessibility and maintenance studies on WEST have been performed with the help of virtual reality. The first ICRH antenna was delivered at Cadarache in July 2016, and is foreseen to be installed on WEST in 2017. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This year Tore-Supra celebrated its 25 years of operation. During this long time, a number of technologies have been developed. First of all, it was mandatory to develop reliable superconducting magnets at ∼1.8 K, with superfluid helium as an efficient coolant. For the production of steady state discharge, three types of radio frequency (RF) additional heating systems have been developed: 1) lower hybrid current drive; 2) ion cyclotron resonance heating; and 3) electron cyclotron resonance heating. To cope with long lasting discharges (up to 380 s × 2.8 MW) and large RF additional heating power (12.3 MW × 3 s), actively cooled (AC) plasma facing components were deployed in Tore-Supra for the first time in a tokamak environment. Tore-Supra is now being modified into a D-shape axisymmetric tokamak with AC tungsten main chamber walls and a divertor, the WEST project (W-for tungsten-environment in steady-state tokamak). This new facility has the objective to offer ITER a test bed for validating the relevant AC metallic technologies in D-shape H-mode plasmas. In contrast to other metallic devices, such as JET and ASDEX Upgrade, WEST will rely only on the RF additional power systems. A set of plasma scenarios have been identified, ranging from a high total RF power scenario up to 15 MW in 30 s, to a high fluence scenario of 1000 s with up to 10 MW of injected RF power. These scenarios are able to reproduce ITER relevant conditions of steady state heat loads of 10-20 MW/m2, to test tungsten AC divertor technologies with relevant power heat fluxes and particle fluence.

Three new ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) launchers have been designed for the WEST project (W-Tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) in order to operate at 3 MW/launcher for 30 s and 1 MW/launcher for 1000 s on H-mode plasmas. These new launchers will be to date the first ICRH launchers to offer the unique combination of continuous-wave (CW) operation at high power and load tolerance capabilities for coupling on H-mode edge. The radio-frequency (RF) design optimization process has been carried out using full-wave electromagnetic solvers combined with electric circuit calculations. Cavity modes occurring between the launchers structures and the vacuum vessel ports have been evaluated and cleared out.

SIDON (SImulator of raDiO-frequency Networks) is an in-house developed Radio-Frequency (RF) network solver that has been implemented to cross-validate the design of WEST ICRF launchers and simulate their impedance matching algorithm while considering all mutual couplings and asymmetries. In this paper, the authors illustrate the theory of SIDON as well as results of its calculations. The authors have built time-varying plasma scenarios (a sequence of launchers front-faces L-mode and H-mode Z-matrices), where at each time step (1 millisecond here), SIDON solves the RF network. At the same time, when activated, the impedance matching algorithm controls the matching elements (vacuum capacitors) and thus their corresponding S-matrices. Typically a 1-second pulse requires around 10 seconds of computational time on a desktop computer. These tasks can be hardly handled by commercial RF software. This innovative work allows identifying strategies for the launchers future operation while insuring the limitations on the currents, voltages and electric fields, matching and Load-Resilience, as well as the required straps voltage amplitude/phase balance. In this paper, a particular attention is paid to the simulation of the launchers behavior when arcs appear at several locations of their circuits using SIDON calculator. This latter work shall confirm or identify strategies for the arc detection using various RF electrical signals. One shall note that the use of such solvers in not limited to ICRF launchers simulations but can be employed, in principle, to any linear or linearized RF problem.

The longstanding expertise of the Tore Supra team in long pulse heating and current drive with radiofrequency (RF) systems will now be exploited in the WEST device (tungsten-W Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) [1]. WEST will allow an integrated long pulse tokamak programme for testing W-divertor components at ITER-relevant heat flux (10-20 MW/m2), while treating crucial aspects for ITER-operation, such as avoidance of W-accumulation in long discharges, monitoring and control of heat fluxes on the metallic plasma facing components (PFCs) and coupling of RF waves in H-mode plasmas. Scenario modelling using the METIS-code shows that ITER-relevant heat fluxes are compatible with the sustainment of long pulse H-mode discharges, at high power (up to 15 MW / 30 s at IP = 0.8 MA) or high fluence (up to 10 MW / 1000 s at IP = 0.6 MA) [2], all based on RF heating and current drive using Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) and Lower Hybrid Current Drive (LHCD). This paper gives a description of the ICRH and LH...

International audience; The design of the WEST (Tungsten-W Environment in Steady-state Tokamak) Ion cyclotron resonance heating antennas is based on a previously tested conjugate-T Resonant Double Loops prototype equipped with internal vacuum matching capacitors. The design and construction of three new WEST ICRH antennas are being carried out in close collaboration with ASIPP, within the framework of the Associated Laboratory in the fusion field between IRFM and ASIPP. The coupling performance to the plasma and the load-tolerance have been improved, while adding Continuous Wave operation capability by introducing water cooling in the entire antenna. On the generator side, the operation class of the high power tetrodes is changed from AB to B in order to allow high power operation (up to 3 MW per antenna) under higher VSWR (up to 2:1). Reliability of the generators is also improved by increasing the cavity breakdown voltage. The control and data acquisition system is also upgraded in order to resolve and react on fast events, such as ELMs. A new optical arc detection system comes in reinforcement of the V r /V f and SHAD systems.

The Ion Cyclotron Heating and Current Drive (IC H & CD) system for ITER will provide Radio frequency (RF) heating and current drive to the ITER plasma. This system is designed to provide 20 MW into the plasma using frequencies in the range of 40 MHz to 55 MHz, which could be upgraded to 40 MW in future. This paper presents the recent development of the IC H&CD system configuration in the ITER Tokamak complex & auxiliary buildings with developed interfaces.