Improvement of neutral beam injection heating efficiency with magnetic field well structures in a tokamak with a low magnetic field

Magnetic well structures are introduced as an effective means to reduce the prompt loss of fast ions, the so-called first orbit loss from neutral beam injection (NBI), which is beneficial to tokamaks with a low magnetic field strength such as small spherical torus devices. It is found by single-particle analysis that this additional field structure can modify the gradient of the magnetic field to reduce the shift of the guiding center trajectory of the fast ion. This result is verified by a numerical calculation of following the fast ion's trajectory. We apply this concept to the Versatile Experiment Spherical Torus [1], where NBI is under design for the purpose of achieving high-performance plasma, to evaluate the effect of the magnetic well structure on NBI efficiency. A 1D NBI analysis code and the NUBEAM code are employed for detailed NBI calculations. The simulation results show that the orbit loss can be reduced by 70%-80%, thereby improving the beam efficiency twofold compared with the reference case without the well structure. The well-shaped magnetic field structure in the low-field side can significantly decrease orbit loss by broadening the non-orbit loss region and widening the range of the velocity direction, thus improving the heating efficiency. It is found that this magnetic well can also improve orbit loss during the slowing down process.