Novel High-Frequency Electric Field Sweeping Concept for High-Power Gyrotron Collectors

Future fusion power plants will require for plasma heating and noninductive current drive high-power gyrotrons, each of which generates 2 MW of continuous-wave microwave power, while another 2 MW in the spent electron beam is dissipated as heat on the collector wall. In today’s 1-MW continuous-wave gyrotrons, collector coils superimpose an ac (10–50 Hz) magnetic field to sweep the hot spots of spent electrons over a large area. However, to double today’s power, it will also be critical to reduce the hot spot dwell time preventing significant increase of material fatigue. This can be achieved by increasing the sweeping frequency. However, a higher frequency magnetic field would hardly penetrate the metallic collector vessel due to eddy currents. Instead of magnetic field, sweeping with electric fields is proposed for the first time. The presented mechanism is capable to apply several orders higher sweeping frequency to reduce the periodic variation of temperature, and thus, the device lifetime can be extended.