We report the status of hybrid scenario experiments in Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR). The hybrid scenario is defined as stationary discharges with β N ⩾ 2.4 and H 89 ⩾ 2.0 at q 95 < 6.5 without or with very mild sawtooth activities in KSTAR. It is being developed towards reactor-relevant conditions. High performance of β N ≲ 3.0, H 89 ≲ 2.4 and G-factor (≡ β N H 89 /q 2 95 ) ≲ 0.46 has been achieved and sustained for ≳ 40τ E at n e /n GW ~0.7 with heating power of ≲5 MW. Some KSTAR hybrid discharges exhibit a unique feature of a slow transition from conventional H-mode to hybrid mode after the third neutral beam injection. The reason for the confinement enhancement is extensively studied in this transition period of a representative discharge exhibiting a common feature of KSTAR hybrid scenarios. 0D performance analysis with magnetohydrodynamic activities, 1D kinetic profile dynamics, power balance analysis, linear gyro-kinetic analysis and edge pedestal stability analysis were conducted. The enhancement is thought to be from both the core and the pedestal. The improvement in the core region of the ion energy channel is observed from the linear gyro-kinetic analysis considering the electromagnetic, the fast ion, the Shafranov shift, ω E×B , and the magnetic shear effect. The electromagnetic finite β stabilisation plays a role in the inner core region at ρ tor ∼ 0.35 together with the fast ion effect. The alpha stabilisation effect is also found at ρ tor ∼ 0.5. ω E×B , which could reduce the linear growth of the ion temperature gradient mode in the outer core region at ρ tor ∼ 0.5 − 0.7 with the highest contribution from the toroidal rotation. Regarding the improvement in the pedestal, Shafranov shift broadens the stability boundary of the pedestal in support of the diamagnetic effect. The pedestal height and width could be reproduced by the EPED model, while a realistic current profile is used to calculate the internal inductance for Shafranov shift. Based on these findings, a comprehensive confinement enhancement mechanism has been proposed by considering the core-edge interplay.

We report a discovery of a fusion plasma regime suitable for commercial fusion reactor where the ion temperature was sustained above 100 million degree about 20 s for the rst time. Nuclear fusion as a promising technology for replacing carbon-dependent energy sources has currently many issues to be resolved to enable its large-scale use as a sustainable energy source. State-of-the-art fusion reactors cannot yet achieve the high levels of fusion performance, high temperature, and absence of instabilities required for steady-state operation for a long period of time on the order of hundreds of seconds. This is a pressing challenge within the eld, as the development of methods that would enable such capabilities is essential for the successful construction of commercial fusion reactor. Here, a new plasma con nement regime called fast ion roled enhancement (FIRE) mode is presented. This mode is realized at Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) and subsequently characterized to show that it meets most of the requirements for fusion reactor commercialization. Through a comparison to other well-known plasma con nement regimes, the favourable properties of FIRE mode are further elucidated and concluded that the novelty lies in the high fraction of fast ions, which acts to stabilize turbulence and achieve steady-state operation for up to 20 s by self-organization. We propose this mode as a promising path towards commercial fusion reactors.

The impact of n=2 resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) on the pedestal and peeling-ballooning mode (PBM) is investigated using the nonlinear 3D MHD code JOREK. It is based on the reduced MHD equations (viscos-resistive MHD), and the experimental parameters from the RMP-driven Edge localized mode (ELM) suppression discharge in KSTAR. In this study, n=2 kink-peeling mode was triggered through nonlinear coupling with RMP, and the pedestal is degraded by increased radial transport due to both tearing and kink-peeling response. The ELM mitigation and suppression are observed when RMP of sufficient amplitude is applied. ELM suppression was characterized by spatial locking of mode structure. In the simulation, the ELM suppression is not only due to the degraded pedestal but is also related to the mode coupling between the PBMs and the RMP-induced mode at the plasma edge. The role of PBM locking in mode suppression is suggested in terms of mode coupling.

A newly developed integrated suite of codes coined as tokamak reactor integrated automated suite for simulation and computation (TRIASSIC) is reported. The suite comprises existing plasma simulation codes, including 1.5D/2D plasma transport solvers and neoclassical/anomalous transport, plasma heating/cooling, and cold neutral models. The components in TRIASSIC are fully modularized by adopting a generic data structure as its internal storage. Primary components such as the transport solver and the neutral beam or electron cyclotron wave actuator were verified to its standalone implementation. The interpretive and predictive simulations of 50 stationary plasma phases from 30 KSTAR discharges were conducted for validation, and a good agreement with experimental measurements on all simulation cases was found.

Parametric dependencies of the linear stability of toroidal Alfvén eigenmode (TAE) in the presence of neutral beam injection (NBI) are investigated to understand the beam drive and damping effect of TAEs in JET and KSTAR. It is found that the results depend on the drift orbit width of the beam-ions normalized to the characteristic mode widths. In addition, an analytic expression of the linear growth rate of TAE driven by ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) fast ions is derived. The developed model is applied to the linear stability analysis of a time-varying JET discharge where both the beam damping and the drive are observed with NBI and ICRH. It can successfully reproduce the experimental observations in spite of simple approximations such as the slowing-down distribution for beam-ions and bi-Maxwellian for ICRH fast ions. We note that strong interaction of TAE with beam occurs in plasmas with rather high density with n l ≳ B 2 0 /9 µ 0 M i v 2 0 favorable for the resonance condition, v 0 > v A /3. The developed model can allow fast estimation of the linear stability of TAEs, so it should be useful for optimizing the scenarios and feedback control.