Feasibility study for a new imaging neutral particle analyser in the asdex upgrade tokamak

Abstract

Magnetically confined fusion plasmas are the prior candidate to achieve an operative fusion power plant. The confinement of fast-ions, i.e. supra-thermal ions, is of paramount importance towards the development of a fully operative fusion reactor. To this end, knowledge of the complete distribution of fast-ions along the plasma is necessary. During this bachelor thesis, a feasibility study for a new imaging neutral particle analyser (INPA) diagnostic at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak was carried out. This detector is able to measure the energy and position of the fast-ion population with high resolution, contributing to the full understanding of its behaviour. In this work, the necessary codes to obtain the synthetic signal, starting from the FIDASIM results, have been developed and tested. A sensitivity study of the geometry of the diagnostic and its impact on the resulting signal was carried out. For the final diagnostic position, the radial and energy resolutions have been estimated and show that the diagnostic can provide high resolution, both in energy (less than 6 keV) and radius (2 cm as lower limit).