Design of the 3.7 GHz, 500 kW CW circulator for the LHCD system of the SST-1 tokamak

Highlights: • Design of a 500 kW CW circulator for LHCD system at 3.7 GHz. • Mechanism for thermal management of ferrite tile. • Scheme for uniform magnetisation of the ferrite tiles. • Design of high CW power CW quadrature and 180 ° hybrid coupler. - Abstract: Circulators are used in high power microwave systems to protect the vacuum source against reflection. The Lower Hybrid Current Drive (LHCD) system of SST-1 tokamak commissioned at IPR, Gandhinagar in India comprises of four high power circulators to protect klystrons (supplying 500 kW CW each at 3.7 GHz) which power the system. This paper presents the design of a Differential Phase Shift Circulator (DPSC) capable of handling 500 kW CW power at 3.7 GHz so that four circulators can be used to protect the four available klystrons. As the DPSC is composed by three main components, viz., magic tee, ferrite phase shifter and 3 dB hybrid coupler, the designing of each of the proposed components is described. The design of these components is carried out factoring various multiphysics aspects of RF, heating due to high CW power and magnetic field requirement of the ferrite phase shifter. The primary objective of this paper is to present the complete RF, magnetic and thermal design of a high CW power circulator. All the simulations have been carried out in COMSOL Multiphysics. The designed circulator exhibits an insertion loss of 0.13 dB with a worst case VSWR of 1.08:1. The total length of the circulator is 3 m.