X-ray tomography system concept for stellarator TJ-II

Abstract

A method based on the principle of x-ray tomography is a good way of assessing the parameters of the radiation emission distribution in the plasma. In this method, a set of radiation detectors is usually placed around a selected section of the plasma or in two groups of detectors arranged perpendicularly to each other in the top and side positions. Such an arrangement is intended to provide a sufficient amount of data to reconstruct the distribution of radiation emission intensities across the plasma cross section. For the plasma produced in the TJ-II stellarator, a two-dimensional (2D) imaging detector is proposed with the ability to discriminate photon energy in only one specifically selected position in the toroidal direction. The proposed diagnostics could come with advantages of a 2D toroidal camera, providing access to 3D information, and would complement standard poloidal tomography. It could be used either for better constraining of the 2D tomography in simple cases with axisymmetric SXR emissivity, for simulation validation of 3D effects in a synthetic diagnostic approach, or to attempt direct 3D tomography. The subject of this contribution is to present the idea of a 3D x-ray tomography system based on the use of a square matrix of GEM detector and the obtained preliminary results of the conducted simulations. The developed diagnostics is to contain 33 462 detection pixels associated with lines of sight. The analysis was carried out on the basis of the numerical simulations based on the GEM_MP.exe and Tomography.exe computer codes (both created at IPPLM) enabling the consideration of free-free, free-bound, and bound-bound x-ray radiation reaching each of the pixels of the GEM diagnostics (GEM_MP.exe code) and testing algorithms proposed for tomographic reconstruction of the plasma emissivity (Tomography.exe code). During calculations, real profiles of electron density and electron temperature, as well as real geometry of the measuring system were taken into account. Additionally, the influence of factors such as filters used in the detector and the efficiency of the used active medium on the quality of tomographic reconstruction was examined. The summary evaluates the proposed tomographic reconstruction method.