Development of Large-Area RF Ion Source for Neutral Beam Injector in Fusion Devices

A large-area RF-driven ion source is being developed at Germany for the heating and current drive of ITER device. Negative hydrogen ion sources are major components of neutral beam injection (NBI) systems in future large-scale fusion experiments such as ITER and DEMO. The 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-U and W7-AS neutral beam heating systems. Ion sources of the first NBI system (NBI-1) for the KSTAR tokamak have been developed successfully with a bucket plasma generator based on the filament arc discharge, which have contributed to achieve a good plasma performance such as 15 sec H-mode operation with an injection of 3.5 MW NB power. 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 the KSTAR and to extract the negative ions for future fusion devices such as Fusion Neutron Source and Korea-DEMO. The development progresses of RF ion source at the KAERI are described in this presentation.