Search

An apparatus for measuring the refrigeration capacity of cryopump refrigerators including the pulse tube type being developed domestically and the GM type has been designed, manufactured, and tested. The refrigeration capacity of a commercial refrigerator was evaluated for confirming the measurement procedure and the operation performance of the apparatus. The measured 2-D refrigeration capacity chart showed the intrinsic characteristics of the refrigerator model used in the experiment. In this paper, design specifications and test results of the refrigeration capacity measurement system is reported and discussed.

Cryopumps can provide economical profits with a relatively high pumping speed per size. However, it is somewhat doubtful that pumping performance of cryopums, which is very sensitive to the temperature of the adsorption panel, can be maintained or recovered fast for large continuous or impulsive gas loads. The official evaluation items indicating cryopump performance for gas loads are the maximum throughput and the crossover value. There are two other, unofficial but widely used, items, the Ar recovery time and gulp characteristics. Although these evaluation items look absolutely different with each other, there are close relations and even duplications in their test schemes. Therefore, it is necessary to study how to improve practically each test procedure, and combine or unify some procedures.

The assembly of the main system of the KSTAR tokamak has been recently completed, and the preparation for the 1st plasma and test operations is progressed. The fueling system established for these purposes uses only one port placed at the opposite side of the pumping duct, and has a difficulty of attaining a uniform and fast supply of fuel particles to the plasma. At the base operation stage after finishing the test operation, the fueling system must be improved to provide a uniform fueling and a feed-back control in accordance with a high-density tokamak plasma maintained for a long period. As a part for understanding the points to be improved in the fueling system, a Monte Carlo simulation on the gas fueling into the tokamak plasma has been executed. After modeling the vacuum vessel and the plasma of quasi-D shapes as tori of rectangular cross-sections, the influences of the position and the number of the fueling inputs on the particle density distribution for a given pumping probability and mean free path were investigated.