Ion collector design for an energy recovery test proposal with the negative ion source NIO1 Available to Purchase

Commercial viability of thermonuclear fusion power plants depends also on minimizing the recirculation power used to operate the reactor. The neutral beam injector (NBI) remains one of the most important method for plasma heating and control. For the future fusion power plant project DEMO, a NBI wall plug efficiency at least of 0.45 is required, while efficiency of present NBI project is about 0.25. The D⁻ beam from a negative ion source is partially neutralized by a gas cell, which leaves more than 40% of energy in residual beams (D⁻ and D⁺), so that an ion beam energy recovery system can significantly contribute to optimize efficiency. Recently, the test negative ion source NIO1 (60 keV, 9 beamlets with 15 mA H⁻ each) has been designed and built at RFX (Padua) for negative ion production efficiency and the beam quality optimization. In this paper, a study proposal to use the NIO1 source also for a beam energy recovery test experiment is presented and a preliminary design of a negative ion beam collector with simulations of beam energy recovery is discussed.