Power deposition calculations of electron cyclotron resonance heating for tandem mirror transport codes

This work couples a tandem mirror transport code with an ECRH ray tracing and absorption code to calculate self-consistently the heating profile and the plasma density and temperatures profiles. A mechanism is developed that produces 3-dimensional models from the radial profiles of transport codes. Using this mechanism, ray tracing calculations through the plasma may be performed. The spatial variation in the absorption of wave energy is determined by evaluating the plasma absorptivity along the trajectory, so that radial power deposition profiles are produced. When using a single ray to simulate an antenna's wave power, unphysical singularities in the power deposited per electron are produced when the ray passes through the plasma axis or is tangent to a flux surface. In reality, the antenna power is spatially distributed and the singularity does not occur. The nature of these singularities is described, as well as their removal by using multiple ray tracing calculations