EFDA-JET-CP(06)03/30
Toroidal Field Ripple Induced Loss of Neutral Beam Injection Ions in JET
In spite of the negligible effect of Toroidal Field (TF) ripples on beam ion confinement in the standard N=32 TF coil configuration of JET, we expect a significant degradation of NBI ion confinement in JET experiments with enhanced TF ripples envisaged for investigating the ripple-effect on the performance of ELMy H-mode plasmas. The ripple enhancement will be accomplished by current reduction in every 2nd coil, whereby an additional N=16 harmonic is introduced in the TF ripple perturbation. Note that, in earlier experiments, an increased ripple induced loss of injected ions has been observed in JET and in TFTR in the energy range T<E<Eb, where T is the plasma temperature and Eb the initial energy of injected ions. A substantial ripple transport mechanism believed to be responsible for this loss is the collisional superbanana diffusion resulting from resonant interaction of toroidally trapped fast ions with ripple perturbations. Here we present results of predictive Fokker-Planck modelling of NBI ion loss in enhanced TF ripples experiments on JET and also interpret the enhanced ripple loss of beam deuterons in previous JET experiments.