Radio Wave Heating in SPARC

The ongoing climate crisis creates a clear need to develop fossil free energy sources. A promising candidate for sustainable energy production is fusion power, which is still in the research phase. The research field includes, among other things, the development of heating methods capable of achieving the extreme temperatures required for successful fusion. One such heating method is radio wave heating, where radio waves are used to accelerate ions into a state called fast ions. These fast ions then transfer energy to other particles through collisions, which contributes to the heating. This study analyzes and compares radio wave heating in two different fusion experiments, JET and SPARC. The purpose of this study is to investigate how knowledge gained from experiments in the fusion reactor JET can be applied to optimize the heating in the upcoming fusion experiment SPARC. This involves identifying conditions to match the fast ion energy and the energy transfer in SPARC with those in JET. With FEMIC and Foppler, two codes developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, simulations are performed to model the behavior of fast ions. To match the fast ion behavior in JET and SPARC, a method is developed that involves scaling the input power in SPARC. The study shows similarities in the fast ions energy and energy transfer in JET and SPARC when the input power in SPARC is scaled with a factor K>1. Specific scale factors K are presented for different scenarios, which can be used in future SPARC experiments in the hope of reusing experimental results and insights gained from JET.