Design for the National RF Test Facility at ORNL

Conceptual and preliminary engineering design for the National RF Test Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been completed. The facility will comprise a single mirror configuration embodying two superconducting development coils from the ELMO Bumpy Torus Proof-of-Principle (EBT-P) program on either side of a cavity designed for full-scale antenna testing. The coils are capable of generating a 1.2-T field at the axial midpoint between the coils separated by 1.0 m. The vacuum vessel will be a stainless steel, water-cooled structure having an 85-cm-radius central cavity. The facility will have the use of a number of continuous wave (cw), radio-frequency (rf) sources at levels including 600 kW at 80 MHz and 100 kW at 28 GHz. Several plasma sources will provide a wide range of plasma environments, including densities as high as ∼5 × 10¹³ cm⁻³ and temperatures on the order of ∼10 eV. Furthermore, a wide range of diagnostics will be available to the experimenter for accurate appraisal of rf testing.