An improved routine for the fast estimate of ion cyclotron heating efficiency in tokamak plasmas

The subroutine ICEVAL for the rapid simulation of Ion Cyclotron Heating in tokamak plasmas is based on analytic estimates of the wave behaviour near resonances, and on drastic but reasonable simplifications of the real geometry. The subroutine has been rewritten to improve the model and to facilitate its use as input in transport codes. In the new version the influence of quasilinear minority heating on the damping efficiency is taken into account using the well-known Stix analytic approximation. Among other improvements are: a) the possibility of considering plasmas with more than two ion species; b) inclusion of Landau, Transit Time and collisional damping on the electrons non localised at resonances; c) better models for the antenna spectrum and for the construction of the power deposition profiles. The results of ICEVAL are compared in detail with those of the full-wave code FELICE for the case of Hydrogen minority heating in a Deuterium plasma; except for details which depend on the excitation of global eigenmodes, agreement is excellent. ICEVAL is also used to investigate the enhancement of the absorption efficiency due to quasilinear heating of the minority ions. The effect is a strongly non-linear function of the available power, and decreases rapidly with increasing concentration. For parameters typical of Asdex Upgrade plasmas, about 4 MW are required to produce a significant increase of the single-pass absorption at concentrations between 10 and 20%. (orig.)