Advances in steady inductive helicity injection for plasma startup and toroidal current drive

The Helicity Injected Torus with Steady Inductive Helicity Injection (HIT-SI) has achieved a breakthrough in the development of a new method of toroidal plasma startup and current drive. HIT-SI accomplishes helicity injection current drive on a spheromak of major radius 0.3 m with two injectors driven sinusoidally at 14.5 kHz. Results include the first sustainment of toroidal plasma current of over 50 kA at up to 3 times the injected currents added in quadrature. Separatrix toroidal currents - currents not linking the helicity injectors - are sustained at up to 40 kA. Toroidal currents persist for up to 0.65 ms after the injectors are turned off. Results are achieved after helium operations condition the alumina plasma-facing surface. The conditioned alumina walls then act to pump the deuterium, thereby reducing the spheromak density. High performance discharges (Itor/Iinj ≥ 2) are characterized by a decrease in the n = 1 mode activity measured by surface probes near the midplane of the confinement volume. Suppression of internal magnetic fields (measured by an internal probe) below the predicted Taylor equilibrium indicates that the magnetic fields in HIT-SI can no longer be described by a zero pressure, constant λ equilibrium. (author)