Studies of beam ion confinement to enhance plasma performance on EAST

A key physics issue for achieving steady-state high-performance plasmas on EAST tokamak is to decrease beam-ion losses to improve plasma confinement during neutral beam injections (NBIs). To decrease the beam losses, previous counter-I_p NBI injections are upgraded to co-I_p injections. Analysis shows that due to the reversed direction of drift across the flux surfaces caused by the pitch angle, the beam prompt loss fraction decreases from about 49% to 3% after the upgrade. Moreover, because of the change of entire beam path, beam shine-through (ST) loss fraction for counter-I_p tangential and counter-I_p perpendicular injections is reversed to co-I_p tangential and co-I_p perpendicular injections, respectively. Due to the change in the initial trapped-confined beam ion fraction caused by the peaked pitch profiles, the losses induced by toroidal ripple field are also reversed after the upgrade. To further improve the beam-ion confinement under the present NBI layout, the amplitudes of toroidal field are increased from 1.75 to 2.20 T. Result shows that, due to the smaller orbit width and peaked pitch angle profile, the beam prompt loss power is lower with higher toroidal field. Due to the synergy of higher initial trapped-confined beam ion fraction and narrower Goldston-White-Boozer (GWB) boundary, the loss induced by ripple diffusion is higher with higher toroidal field. The combined effect of beam ST loss, prompt loss and ripple loss, contributes to the increase in beam ion density. The decrease in beam loss power enhances beam heating efficiency, especially the fraction of beam heating ions. Finally, comparison between simulation and measurement by ²³⁵U fission chamber (FC) indicates that the increase in neutron rate is mainly contributed by improvement of beam-ion confinement. This study can provide potential support for beam operation and high-T_i experiment on EAST tokamak.