Ion Cyclotron Heating and Current Drive system (IC H&CD) shall provide ion cyclotron radio-frequency (RF) power for plasma heating, current drive, control of sawtooth activity, wall cleaning and bulk RF heating of the ITER DT, D, H and He plasma, with preference to bulk ion heating.
This heating power shall assist in accessing the H mode and achieving Q=10. The heating power shall also assist in accomplishing several functions of plasma control, such as control of plasma burn and transport. The IC H&CD system shall be capable of driving continuous on-axis current for the DT, D, H and He plasma.
In particular, it shall provide central current drive in high bootstrap current fraction scenarios. The IC H&CD shall be capable of driving ion minority current at the outboard of the q = 1 magnetic surface for the control of the saw-tooth period, at the nominal BT = 5.3 T.
The system shall deliver a nominal power of 24 MW to the ITER plasma in the frequency range of 40 to 55 MHz, by means of phased IC antenna arrays incorporated in dedicated equatorial port plugs. The IC H&CD shall provide RF power to perform IC Wall Conditioning (ICWC) and contribute to achieving plasma breakdown, burn-through and assisted current rise by delivering a fraction of the nominal power.
The IC H&CD system provides two essential functions: plasma heating and on-axis current drive, and several auxiliary functions: plasma and burn control, help in plasma shut-down, wall conditioning at full field, plasma breakdown and assisted current rise.
The IC H&CD system is composed of eight identical sub-systems, each including the same components i.e. section of antenna array, matching network, vacuum transmission line and main transmission line,
The IC H&CD shall initially provide RF power through 4 RF Sources (3MW/VSWR 1.5 & Bandwidth of ±1MHz) to perform ICWC mainly and for heating experiment of the ITER DT plasma during Start of Research Operation (SRO) using single antenna on port 13. Later on, 10MW more RF power may be added depending on the experimental observations.