NSTX High Field Side Gas Fueling System
Authors: H.W. Kugel, M. Anderson, G. Barnes, M. Bell, W. Blanchard, L. Dudek, D. Gates, R. Gernhardt, R. Maingi, D. Mueller, T. Provost, R. Raman, V. Soukhanovskii, and J. Winston
Date of PPPL Report: October 2003
To be presented at: the 20th IEEE/NPSS Symposium on Fusion Engineering (SOFE2003), 14-17 October 2003, San Diego, California. Proceedings to be published by IEEE.
Fueling National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) plasmas with gas injected from the high field side (HFS) has produced earlier, more reliable transitions to the H-mode, longer H-mode durations, higher toroidal rotation, and higher edge electron temperature compared with similar discharges using the low field side (LFS) gas fueling injectors. The HFS gas fueling system consists of a Center Stack midplane injector, and an injector at the inner, upper corner of the Center Stack. The challenging design and installation constraints for the HFS gas system involved placing the control components as close as possible to the machine-vacuum interface, devising a special feed-through flange, traversing through vessel regions whose temperatures during bake-out range from 150 to 350 degrees Centigrade, adapting the gas transport tubing size and route to the small instrumentation wire channels behind the existing graphite plasma facing component tiles on the Center Stack, and providing output orifices shielded from excessive plasma power depositions while concentrating the output flow to facilitate fast camera viewing and analysis. Design, recent performance, and future upgrades will be presented.