Parametric scalings of the intrinsic (spontaneous, with no external momentum input) toroidal rotation observed on a large number of tokamaks have been combined with an eye towards revealing the underlying mechanism(s) and extrapolation to future devices. The intrinsic rotation velocity has been found to increase with plasma stored energy or pressure in JET, Alcator C-Mod, Tore Supra, DIII-D, JT-60U and TCV, and to decrease with increasing plasma current in some of these cases. Use of dimensionless parameters has led to a roughly unified scaling with MA ∝ βN, although a variety of Mach numbers works fairly well; scalings of the intrinsic rotation velocity with normalized gyro-radius or collisionality show no correlation. Whether this suggests the predominant role of MHD phenomena such as ballooning transport over turbulent processes in driving the rotation remains an open question. For an ITER discharge with βN = 2.6, an intrinsic rotation Alfven Mach number of MA ≃ 0.02 may be expected from the above deduced scaling, possibly high enough to stabilize resistive wall modes without external momentum input.

The aim of this work is to provide an understanding of detachment at TCV with emphasis on analysis of the Balmer line emission. A new Divertor Spectroscopy System has been developed for this purpose. Further development of Balmer line analysis techniques has allowed detailed information to be extracted from the three-body recombination contribution to the n=7 Balmer line intensity. During density ramps, the plasma at the target detaches as inferred from a drop in ion current to the target. At the same time the Balmer $6\rightarrow2$ and $7\rightarrow2$ line emission near the target is dominated by recombination. As the core density increases further, the density and recombination rate are rising all along the outer leg to the x-point while remaining highest at the target. Even at the highest core densities accessed (Greenwald fraction 0.7) the peaks in recombination and density may have moved not more than a few cm poloidally away from the target which is different to other, higher density tokamaks, where both the peak in recombination and density continue to move towards the x-point as the core density is increased. The inferred magnitude of recombination is small compared to the target ion current at the time detachment (particle flux drop) starts at the target. However, recombination may be having more localized effects (to a flux tube) which we cannot discern at this time. Later, at the highest densities achieved, the total recombination does reach levels similar to the particle flux.Comment: Article accepted for publication in Journal of Nuclear Materials and Energ

Divertor detachment is explored on the TCV tokamak in alternative magnetic geometries. Starting from typical TCV single-null shapes, the poloidal flux expansion at the outer strikepoint is varied by a factor of 10 to investigate the X-divertor characteristics, and the total flux expansion is varied by 70% to study the properties of the super-X divertor. The effect of an additional X-point near the target is investigated in X-point target divertors. Detachment of the outer target is studied in these plasmas during Ohmic density ramps and with the ion ∇B drift away from the primary X-point. The detachment threshold, depth of detachment, and the stability of the radiation location are investigated using target measurements from the wall-embedded Langmuir probes and two-dimensional CIII line emissivity profiles across the divertor region, obtained from inverted, toroidally-integrated camera data. It is found that increasing poloidal flux expansion results in a deeper detachment for a given line-averaged density and a reduction in the radiation location sensitivity to core density, while no large effect on the detachment threshold is observed. The total flux expansion, contrary to expectations, does not show a significant influence on any detachment characteristics in these experiments. In X-point target geometries, no evidence is found for a reduced detachment threshold despite a Nuclear Fusion Results from recent detachment experiments in alternative divertor configurations on TCVInternational Atomic Energy Agency a See the author list of 'Overview of progress in European Medium Sized Tokamaks towards an integrated plasma-edge/wall solution' by H. Meyer et al, to be published in the Nuclear Fusion

Abstract.A new paradigm is presented to reconstruct the plasma current density profile in a tokamak in real-time. The traditional method of basing the reconstruction on real-time diagnostics combined with a real-time GradShafranov solver suffers from the difficulty of obtaining reliable internal current profile measurements with sufficient spatial and temporal accuracy to have a complete picture of the profile evolution at all times. A new methodology is proposed in which the plasma current density profile is simulated in real-time by solving the first-principle physics-based equations determining its evolution. Effectively, an interpretative transport simulation similar to those run today in post-plasma shot analysis is performed in real-time. This provides realtime reconstructions of the current density profile with spatial and temporal resolution constrained only by the capabilities of the computational platform used and not by the available diagnostics or the choice of basis functions. The diagnostic measurements available in real-time are used to constrain and improve the accuracy of the simulated profiles. Estimates of other plasma quantities, related to the current density profile, become available in real-time as well. The implementation of the proposed paradigm in the TCV tokamak is discussed, and its successful use in plasma experiments is demonstrated. This framework opens up the possibility of unifying q profile reconstructions across different tokamaks using a common physics model and will support a wealth of applications in which improved real-time knowledge of the plasma state is used for feedback control, disruption avoidance, scenario monitoring, and external disturbance estimation.

Ohmic energy confinement saturation is found to be closely related to core toroidal rotation reversals in Alcator C-Mod tokamak plasmas. Rotation reversals occur at a critical density, depending on the plasma current and toroidal magnetic field, which coincides with the density separating the linear Ohmic confinement regime from the saturated Ohmic confinement regime. The rotation is directed co-current at low density and abruptly changes direction to counter-current when the energy confinement saturates as the density is increased. Since there is a bifurcation in the direction of the rotation at this critical density, toroidal rotation reversal is a very sensitive indicator in the determination of the regime change. The reversal and confinement saturation results can be unified since these processes occur at a particular value of the collisionality.