Functional Optimization for a Beam Driven Plasma Neutralizer in DEMO Neutral Beam Injector

The Beam Driven Plasma Neutralizer (BDPN) has been proposed as a more efficient alternative to the gas neutralizer for negative-ion based Neutral Beam Injection (NNBI). In this paper we model the performance of an entire NNBI beamline with a BDPN. We simultaneously consider all the relevant physics and engineering aspects, the most important being the plasma density and degree of ionization inside the BDPN as a function of its geometry and feed gas flow, the geometrical transmission of the beamline, the dependence of the neutral gas distribution in the beamline on the geometry of the beamline components and gas flows, and the species evolution of the extracted D$^-$ beam through this neutral and charged particle distribution. Furthermore, we calculate the heat loads expected on the BDPN parts and on the NBI components located downstream of it and study the effect of the magnetic cusp field across the BDPN entrance on beamline transmission. While our results constitute an optimization only under the applied boundary conditions, we find that the beamline with a BDPN increases the system's wall plug efficiency by about 13% to 0.34 from the 0.30 estimated for a gas neutralizer.
Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures. Published in Fusion Engineering and Design in occasion of the SOFT 2022 conference