Analysis and Design of Components for High Power Millimeter Wave Transmission Lines

The DOE is seeking the development of components related to the generation, transmission, and launching of the high power electromagnetic waves needed to heat and fuel fusion plasmas. Overmoded transmission lines are used for a variety of applications for low loss transmission of microwave and millimeter waves. However, the large surface area of typical components in these transmission lines make them impractical to model with current commercial electromagnetic codes. Accordingly, the lack of any practical analysis tool makes the design of very high efficiency components difficult to achieve. Therefore, this project will develop a new analysis tool and use it to design components of interest in overmoded transmission lines.Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The new computational tool would allow the design and analysis of overmoded transmission line components, including switches, miterbends, polarizing miterbends, gaps, and bellows. In the addition to the application to fusion energy systems, the technology should find use in a wide variety of applications such as electron cyclotron resonance heating systems, radar, and spectroscopy