Observation of secondary instability of 2/1 magnetic island in compass high density limit plasmas

• Autor(a) principal: S. I. W. Shah
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: F. Salzedas, J. Havlicek, J. Stöckel, C. Silva
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/85330
• topic: Física; Physical sciences

Density limit disruptions (DLDs) have been observed in tokamak plasmas when high density regimes are explored. The DLDs are harmless in small size tokamaks like COMPASS,larger tokamaks like JET try to avoid them and they are extremely undesirable in ITER sizetokamaks due to the severe structural damages they can cause. It is very important to understand the dynamics of the DLDs so that better strategies to ameliorate or avoid them can bedeveloped. In this work, following detection in JET [1] of a secondary instability (SI) to thewell-known m/n = 2/1 MHD mode (where m and n are the poloidal and toroidal mode numbers, respectively) in the precursor of DLD, we analyse the evolution of the 2/1 magnetic islandin COMPASS DLD to look for the presence of this SI just close to the onset of energy quenchphase of the disruption. The presence of this SI to the magnetic island was associated with theoccurrence of minor disruptions preceding the major disruption and with the major disruptionitself in [1]. The coherence observed between the perturbations caused by the SI in the magneticpoloidal flux and in the electron temperature was very high (above 0.9), allowing to determinethat the SI perturbations came from the same position as the magnetic island. In the work presented here, only the perturbations in the magnetic poloidal flux are analysed since at the time ofthe experiments in COMPASS, no diagnostics was operational for measuring the time evolutionof the electron temperature with high time rate.Nonlinear MHD numerical simulations have also shown that island deformation during itsrapid growth can lead to the secondary magnetic island formation [2]. A recent review [3] ofthe theory of current sheet formation that leads to magnetic reconnection discusses the role ofplasmoids during magnetic island evolution. Since the validity ranges of the mentioned theoretical works are not directly comparable to the experimental conditions, one cannot claimwith certainty that the SI observed in JET [1] and in COMPASS disruptions (reported here)are the same as observed in those numerical works [2, 3]. However, there are some qualitative43rd EPS Conference on Plasma Physics P5.003similarities between them.The main COMPASS [4] diagnostics used for the analysis in the present work, are the threetoroidally separated arrays (A at 32.5◦, B at 212.5◦and C at 257.5◦from the vessel axis) ofMirnov coils (MCs), each with 24 MCs located poloidally. The MC arrays A and C, toroidallyseparated by 135◦, measure the change in poloidal magnetic flux, dBp/dt. The MC array B,toroidally separated by 180◦to the array A, measures the poloidal magnetic field, Bp. Thesemagnetic sensors have good responsivity to high frequency (up to 1 MHz).