Design of a tritium pellet injector for TFTR

The TFTR (Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor) tritium pellet injector (TPI) is designed to provide a tritium pellet fueling capability with pellet speeds in the 1-3-km/s-range for the TFTR D-T phase. The existing TFTR deuterium pellet injector is being modified at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide a four-shot, tritium-compatible, pipe-gun configuration with three upgraded single-stage pneumatic guns and a two-stage light gas gun driver. The pipe gun concept has been qualified for tritium operation by the tritium proof-of-principle injector experiments conducted on the Tritium Systems Test Assembly at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In these experiments, tritium and D-T pellets were accelerated to speeds near 1.5 km/s. The TPI is being designed for pellet sizes in the range from 3.43 to 4.0 mm in diameter in arbitrarily programmable firing sequences at speeds up to approximately 1.5 km/s for the three single-stage drivers and 2.5 to 3 km/s for the two-stage driver. Injector operation will be controlled by a programmable logic controller. >