Pellet injector development and experiments at ORNL

The development of pellet injectors for plasma fueling of magnetic confinement fusion experiments has been under way at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the past 15 years. Recently, ORNL provided a tritium-compatible four-shot pneumatic injector for the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) based on the in situ condensation technique that features three single-stage gas guns and an advanced two-stage light gas gun driver. In another application, ORNL supplied the Tore Supra tokamak with a centrifuge pellet injector in 1989 for pellet fueling experiments that has achieved record numbers of injected pellets into a discharge. Work is progressing on an upgrade to that injector to extend the number of pellets to 400 and improve pellet repeatability. In a new application, the ORNL three barrel repeating pneumatic injector has been returned from JET and is being readied for installation on the DIII-D device for fueling and enhanced plasma performance experiments. In addition to these experimental applications, ORNL is developing advanced injector technologies, including high-velocity pellet injectors, tritium pellet injectors, and long-pulse feed systems. The two-stage light gas gun and electron-beam-driven rocket are the acceleration techniques under investigation for achieving high velocity. A tritium proof-of-principle (TPOP) experiment has demonstrated the feasibility of tritium pellet production and acceleration. A new tritium-compatible, extruder-based, repeating pneumatic injector is being fabricated to replace the pipe gun in the TPOP experiment and will explore issues related to the extrudability of tritium and acceleration of large tritium pellets. The tritium pellet formation experiments and development of long-pulse pellet feed systems are especially relevant to the International Tokamak Engineering Reactor (ITER).