Neutral beam injection in a D-3He FRC reactor

The use of neutral beam injection (NBI) to sustain a fraction of the plasma current in a field reversed configuration (FRC) reactor operating with the D-3He reaction is studied. A Monte Carlo code already used to study NBI in medium size FRCs is employed (Lifschitz A F, Farengo R and Arista N R 2002 Nucl. Fusion 42 863, Lifschitz A F, Farengo R and Arista N R 2002 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 44 1979, Lifschitz A F, Farengo R and Hoffman A L 2004 Nucl. Fusion 44 1015) and the plasma parameters are similar to those proposed in the ARTEMIS (Momota H, Ishida A, Kohzaki Y, Miley G, Ohi S, Ohnishi M, Sato K, Steinhauer L, Tomita Y and Tuszewki M 1992 Fusion Technol. 21 2307) conceptual reactor design. A simple analysis shows that the driven current cannot reach the values quoted in the ARTEMIS project and a procedure to search for plasma parameters that result in higher efficiencies is presented