Influence of impurities on the transition from minority to mode conversion heating in (3He)–H plasmas

Paper i proceeding, 2014

Ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) is one of the main auxiliary heating systems used in present-day tokamaks and is planned to be installed in ITER. In the initial full-field phase of ITER operating with hydrogen majority plasmas, fundamental resonance heating of helium-3 ions is one of a few ICRH schemes available. Past JET experiments with the carbon wall revealed a significant impact of impurities on the ICRH performance in (3He)–H plasmas. A significant reduction of the helium-3 concentration, at which the transition from minority ion to mode conversion heating occurs, was found to be due to a high plasma contamination with carbon ions. In this paper we discuss the effect of Be and another impurity species present at JET after the installation of a new ITER-like wall on the transition helium-3 concentration in (3He)–H plasmas. We suggest a potential method for controlling helium-3 level needed for a specific ICRH regime by puffing an extra helium-4 gas to the plasma.