Computer based techniques to design antennas in microwave diagnostics for fusion plasmas

摘要

Fusion research aims at large scale energy production with low environmental impact. A new machine (ITER) will be constructed in the frame of the collaboration between EU, Japan, RF, Canada, China and US. Microwave reflectometry is an essential diagnostic for ITER, one key issue being the design of antennas to launch and receive the probing microwaves. We develop a set of software tools to study those antennas. A mode matching FORTRAN code calculates the field distribution in the antenna aperture. The target fusion plasma is built and modeled by a MATLAB code and in order to solve the ray tracing differential equations we used the numerical Runge-Kutta method. A graphical user interface (GUI) was coded in MATLAB. A ray tracing approach computes the wave trajectory in the plasma and provides an estimation of the reflected energy. The developed software package proofed essential to design microwave antennas for reflectometry diagnostics.