https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201920301008
Theory
Fast evaluation of the current drive efficiency by electron cyclotron waves for reactor studies
1
Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik Garching bei München Germany
2
CCFE, Culham Science Centre , Abingdon UK
* e-mail: Emanuele.Poli@ipp.mpg.de
Published online: 25 March 2019
The determination of the current driven by electron cyclotron waves is usually performed employing ray/beam tracing codes, which require as an input the magnetic equilibrium, the electron density and the electron temperature profiles on one side and the beam injection parameters on the other. In the frame of systems-code applications, however, a different approach is needed, as some of the required input quantities are not available. Here, a procedure to evaluate the achievable ECCD efficiency for given global reactor parameters is proposed. It relies on a single numerical evaluation of the current drive efficiency (based on the adjoint method and including momentum-conserving corrections) for suitably chosen input values. The results are shown to be in good agreement with the full numerical optimization of the ECCD efficiency for a number of reactor-relevant scenarios. As described in this paper, this approach does not include the effect of parasitic absorption from higher cyclotron harmonics, which becomes important starting from electron temperatures of the order of 30 keV.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2019
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
