Research of aluminum nitride water load for the 4.6 GHz 500 kW LHCD system of the CFETR

To meet the increasing heating needs of the China Fusion Experimental Tokamak Reactor (CFETR), the output power in each Lower Hybrid Current Drive (LHCD) transmission line should be increased from 250 kW to 500 kW. Therefore, a new high-power water load must be developed for the 4.6 GHz 500 kW LHCD system. This paper aims to report the most recent research progress of the water load: aluminum nitride (AlN) ceramic is used as the media material to isolate the water and vacuum, and the radio frequency (RF) simulation results show that the return loss of the water load is less than -25dB at 4.6 GHz over a wide temperature range. Under 500 kW continuous wave (CW) operation, the maximum temperatures of the ceramic and water are separately 67 ℃ and 62 ℃, resulting in thermal deformation of the ceramic of approximately 0.003 mm. Moreover, the AlN water load was tested on the 4.6 GHz 250 kW high-power test bench and found to work well with low reflected power.