Development and preliminary results of radio frequency ion source

A radio frequency (RF) ion source was designed and developed for neutral beam injector. A RF driver test bed was used with a RF generator with maximum power of 25 kW with 1 MHz frequency and a matching box. In order to study the characteristic of RF plasma generation, the capacitance in the matching box was adjusted with different cases. The results show that lower capacitance will better the stability of the plasma with higher RF power. In the future, new RF coils and matching box will be developed for plasma generators with higher RF power of 50 kW.