Heating and Particle Build-Up of Field-Reversed Configuration due to Neutral Particle Injection in a Translation Process

Abstract

The magnetic configuration of a field-reversed configuration (FRC) has a center closed region and open field region. Because of this geometrical property, an FRC can be translated from a formation theta-pinch region into a confinement region while it keeps the closed magnetic field. In this work, the “equivalent” neutral beam injection (NBI) in the translation process has been proposed as a heating and particle injection method for an FRC. Translating an FRC plasma through neutral gas background is equivalent to an end-on NBI into the FRC. For the neutral particle density of 1 × 10²⁰m^-3, translation velocity of 100km/s and translation length of 1m, the number of particles ˜3 × 10¹⁸ and the kinetic energy of ˜40J are supplied due to the equivalent NBI.