Design of the shattered pellet injection system for ASDEX Upgrade

Abstract

A new shattered pellet injection system was designed and built to perform disruption mitigation experiments on ASDEX Upgrade. The system can inject pellets with diameters of 1, 2, 4, or 8 mm with variable lengths over a range of L/D ratios of ∼0.5-1.5. By using helium or deuterium as propellant gas, the pellets can be accelerated to speeds between 60 and 750 m/s. The velocity range slightly depends on the pellet mass. The injection system is capable of preparing three pellets in separate barrels at the same time. Once accelerated by the propellant gas pulse, the pellets travel through one of three parallel flight tubes. Each flight tube is separated into three sections with increasing diameters of 12, 14, and 16 mm. Two gaps between the sections allow for removal of the propellant gas by expansion into two separate expansions tanks (0.3 and 0.035 m³), pellet observation in the first gap and the torus gate valve in the second. Each flight tube end is equipped with an exchangeable shatter head with different shatter angles, square or circular cross-section, and different lengths. The gas preparation and control systems allow highly automated pellet generation for precision of the pellet composition and an excellent reproducibility of shattered pellet experiments.