An Indian test facility to characterise diagnostic neutral beam for ITER

The diagnostic neutral beam (DNB) line shall be used to diagnose the He ash content in the D–T phase of the ITER machine using the charge exchange recombination spectroscopy (CXRS). Implementation of a successful DNB at ITER requires several challenges related to the production, neutralization and transport of the neutral beam over path lengths of 20.665 m, to be overcome. The delivery is aided if the above effects are tested prior to onsite commissioning. As DNB is a procurement package for INDIA, an ITER approved Indian test facility, INTF, is under construction at Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), India and is envisaged to be operational in 2015. The timeline for this facility is synchronized with the RADI, ELISE (IPP, Garching), SPIDER (RFX, Padova) in a manner that best utilization of configurational inputs available from them are incorporated in the design. This paper describes the facility in detail and discusses the experiments planned to optimise the beam transmission and testing of the beam line components using various diagnostics.