Construction, Calibration and Testing of a Multi-Waveguide Array for the Application of LHCD on Alcator C-MOD

A collaborative project between MIT and Princeton has been undertaken to fabricate a high power system for application of lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) on the Alcator C-MOD device. The ultimate goal of the project is to have the ability to apply up to 3 MW of 4.6 GHz rf power to drive current for the study of advanced tokamak operation on C-MOD. As part of the PPPL portion of the collaboration a high power wave-guide launching array has been designed and constructed to support 1.5 MW application to the plasma based on previous experimental power limits (and possibly supporting 2 MW application with advanced conditioning). In this paper we will describe the construction, calibration and testing techniques utilized and the results obtained during the construction phase