The influence of grid positioning on the beam optics in the neutral beam injectors for ITER

Neutral beam injectors are routinely used to increase the ion temperature in magnetically confined plasmas. Typically, the beam is produced by neutralizing a bundle of hundreds of ion beamlets, energized in a multi-grid multi-stage accelerator. Precise aiming of each beamlet is required in order to focus the full beam to the plasma, avoiding any interception with beamline surfaces and with the beam duct. This paper describes the effects of grid in-plane and out-of-plane displacements (mispositioning, thermal expansion, grid tilting, etc...) in the case of the MITICA electrostatic accelerator, which is the full scale prototype of the ITER heating neutral beam injector. Various simulations have been carried out with the OPERA 3D code, by self-consistently simulating the beam charged particles travelling in an externally applied electric and magnetic field. The accelerator grids act like a series of electrostatic lenses, and produce a net deflection of the particles when one or more grids are offset. The numerical simulations were used to evaluate the "steering constant" of each grid and also showed that the linear superposition of effects was applicable, multiple causes of mispositioning are combined and used to quantify the overall effect in terms of beam misalignment.