Development of a Utility Negative Ion Test Equipment With RF Source at ASIPP

It is devoted to some crucial issues of the RF-driven negative-ion source, such as the improvement of RF efficiency, the enhancement of the extracted negative-ion current density, and the promotion of the beam qualities. In the initial stage, the HUNTER negative-ion source conservatively adopted a similar structure of the ITER prototype source developed at IPP, Garching.

It consists of single or double RF driver on the back side of a plasma expansion chamber, and a negative ion accelerator which is able to extract 120 beamlets up to 60 kV for 10 s. In the first phase operation of the HUNTER-ion source, a low-pressure (0.3 Pa) plasma has been successfully achieved by coupling 46-kW RF input power and different plasma parameters have been measured by using Langmuir probes and optical emission spectroscopy.