Development and conditioning of the high current ion source for the EAST neutral beam injector

A 4 MW high current ion source is developed for the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) neutral beam injector (NBI). The EAST-NBI ion source is conditioned and the primary results and analysis are reported in this paper. The plasma current of plasma generator reaches 1100 A and maximum arc power reaches 90 kW. Plasma density uniformity is measured by Langmuir probes and is estimated as 90%. The hydrogen ion beam extracted from a tetrode multi-slot accelerator with beam energy of 80 keV. The mean arc efficiency is 0.5 A/kW and beam pervereance is 2.5 μp. The experimental results show that, the high current ion source is developed and conditioned successfully.