The work presents the results of the energy confinement study carried out on the compact spherical tokamak (ST) Globus-M2 with toroidal magnetic field (BT) as high as 0.8 T. A reproducible and stable discharge was obtained with the average plasma density (5-10) 1019 m-3. Despite the increase in the magnetic field, the neutral beam injection (NBI) led to clear and reproducible transition to the H-mode accompanied by a decrease in the turbulence level at the plasma edge. NBI allowed effectively heat the plasma: electron and ion temperatures in the plasma core exceeded 1 keV. In comparison with the previous experiments carried out with BT=0.4 T plasma total stored energy was increased by a factor of 4. The main reason of this phenomenon is a strong dependence of the energy confinement time (τE) on the toroidal magnetic field in the spherical tokamak. It was experimentally confirmed that such kind of dependence is valid for ST with magnetic field up to 0.8 T. It also has been shown that the enhancement of the energy confinement in the Globus-M2 with collisionality decrease is associated with an improvement of both electron and ion heat transport.
Among the peripheral instabilities observed at the Globus-M2 tokamak, two types of edge localized modes (ELMs) are brought into focus: ELMs synchronized and desynchronized with the sawtooth oscillations. The desynchronized ELMs appear in regimes that are characterized by high values of pressure in the pedestal, pped ≥ 3 kPa, and they are observed in discharges with the toroidal magnetic field BT > 0.6 T and plasma current IP > 0.3 MA. The desynchronized ELMs belong to the type-III/V with the dominating effect of the peeling mode. The synchronized ELMs were observed in a wider range of discharge parameters, including at BT < 0.6 T and IP < 0.3 MA. Calculations of the stability of the peeling-ballooning (PB) mode showed that at pedestal width ψnorm = 0.09 and pped > 3.5 kPa, destabilization of PB modes is possible without additional influence. Experimental data shows that the microtearing mode plays a dominant role in the pedestal. The microtearing mode does not allow the pedestal at Globus-M2 tokamak to reach the state of the unstable kinetic ballooning mode (KBM), which explains the low predictive power of the EPED model at this tokamak.
Filaments or blobs are well known to strongly contribute to particle and energy losses both in L- and H-mode, making them an important plasma characteristic to investigate. They are plasma structures narrowly localized across a magnetic field and stretched along magnetic field lines. In toroidal devices, their development is observed to take place in the peripheral plasma. Filament characteristics have been studied extensively over the years using various diagnostic techniques. One such diagnostic is the Doppler backscattering (DBS) method employed at the spherical tokamak Globus-M/M2. It has been observed that the DBS signal reacts to the backscattering from filaments. However, the DBS data have proven difficult to analyze, which is why modelling was undertaken using the code IPF-FD3D to understand what kind of information can be extrapolated from the signals. A circular filament was thoroughly investigated in slab geometry with a variety of characteristics studied. Apart from that, the motion of the filaments in the poloidal and radial directions was analyzed. Additionally, other shapes of filaments were presented in this work. Modelling for the real geometry of the Globus-M/M2 tokamak was performed.
The paper provides an overview of the results obtained on the spherical tokamak Globus-M2 in 2019–2020. The experiments were performed with the toroidal magnetic field up to 0.8 T and plasma current up to 0.4 MA (80% of the design values). The temperature of electrons 1 keV and ions 800 eV at the plasma density of 1020 m−3 were recorded at neutral beam injection (850 kW, 28.5 keV). Heat conductivity analysis was made by means of the codes ASTRA 7.0, NCLASS, SPIDER, NUBEAM, 3D fast ion tracking algorithm on the basis of the experimental data. A scaling for spherical tokamaks, which demonstrates strong τ E dependence on magnetic field and moderate dependence on plasma current, has been confirmed for the magnetic field up to 0.8 T. For Globus-M/M2 it is . The dependence of the normalized energy confinement time (B T τ E) on collisionality (ν*) in a wide range 0.02 < ν* < 0.2 was determined as . A non-inductively driven current was recorded during the launch of the electromagnetic waves of the lower hybrid frequency range (2.45 GHz) with the help of a toroidally oriented grill. The fraction of noninductively driven current has exceeded 70% in the discharge with a total current of 0.2 MA. The achieved values of efficiency η = (0.15–0.4) × 1019 A m−2 W−1 are comparable with the results obtained on conventional tokamaks. This paper presents the results of experiments on the study of Alfvén modes. The resulting scaling for the loss of fast ions caused by toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes demonstrates their decrease with increasing magnetic field and plasma current. Observation of Alfvén cascades made it possible to apply the method of MHD spectroscopy to determine the evolution of q min in a discharge. Also presented are the results of SOL investigation. Attention is also paid to the development of diagnostics.
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