Performance analysis of experimental device of travelling wave direct energy converter

Numerical analyses with the one-dimensional approximation have been carried out for a small-scale experimental device of TWDEC. The following results have been obtained. Numerical results agree well with experimental results on the conversion efficiency and the energy distribution when the phase difference between voltages of the modulator and the decelerator is the same as the experiment. It has been found that the phase difference should be determined properly in order to obtain a high efficiency. The position of electrodes in the decelerator has been optimized to obtain higher efficiency. The optimization is carried out for ions to move with the travelling electric field. It has been shown that the optimization can make the efficiency more than 58% when the number of electrodes is 16 even with the present small device.