ECRH and ECCD modeling studies for DEMO

Among the additional heating systems foreseen for the first planned reactor DEMO, which has the aim of demonstrating the production of electricity through controlled thermonuclear fusion reactions, the Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating and Current Drive (ECRH&CD) system is considered essential for granting reliable plasma operation. In this work the quantitative study of EC system performances in the main DEMO operational scenario is presented, focusing on the physics tasks which such system is foreseen to accomplish: bulk heating, current drive and mitigation of MHD instabilities in the core of the plasma, and control of thermal instability in the plasma edge region. To this aim, the EC system must provide proper different radial localizations and combination of heating and non-inductive CD. In order to find suitable launcher configurations, the beam tracing code GRAY has been used to perform scans in the launcher parametric space defined by the injection angles, the wave frequency and the antenna position. Main optimization results are shown, taking into account the peculiar physics requirements and issues, and the engineering constraints of a fusion power plant reactor.