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The influence of an ITER-like wall on disruptions at JET

Author
Abstract

In order to preserve the integrity of large tokamaks such as ITER, the number of disruptions has to be limited. JET has operated previously with a low frequency of disruptions (i.e., disruption rate) of 3.4% [P. C. de Vries et al., Nucl. Fusion 51, 053018 (2011)]. The start of operations with the new full-metal ITER-like wall at JET showed a marked rise in the disruption rate to 10%. A full survey was carried out to identify the root causes, the chain-of-events and classifying each disruption, similar to a previous analysis for carbon-wall operations. It showed the improvements made to avoid various disruption classes, but also indicated those disruption types responsible for the enhanced disruption rate. The latter can be mainly attributed to disruptions due to too high core radiation but also due to density control issues and error field locked modes. Detailed technical and physics understanding of disruption causes is essential for devising optimized strategies to avoid or mitigate these events.

Year of Publication
2014
Journal
Physics of Plasmas
Volume
21
Number
5
Number of Pages
056101
URL
http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/pop/21/5/10.1063/1.4872017
DOI
10.1063/1.4872017
PId
928816f24cf7568765c40767a08e9e4c
Alternate Journal
Phys. Plasmas
Journal Article
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