As the finalization of the hydrogen experiment towards the deuterium phase, the exploration of the best performance of the hydrogen plasma was intensively performed in the Large Helical Device (LHD). High ion and electron temperatures, Ti, Te, of more than 6 keV were simultaneously achieved by superimposing the high power electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECH) on the neutral beam injection (NBI) heated plasma. Although flattening of the ion temperature profile in the core region was observed during the discharges, one could avoid the degradation by increasing the electron density. Another key parameter to present plasma performance is an averaged beta value . The high regime around 4 % was extended to an order of magnitude lower than the earlier collisional regime. Impurity behaviour in hydrogen discharges with NBI heating was also classified with the wide range of edge plasma parameters. Existence of no impurity accumulation regime where the high performance plasma is maintained with high power heating > 10 MW was identified. Wide parameter scan experiments suggest that the toroidal rotation and the turbulence are the candidates for expelling impurities from the core region.
The effects of the net toroidal current on the local ideal MHD stability or the Mercier criterion are investigated for a plasma in the heliotron/torsatron configuration by taking the Large Helical Device as an example. The three dimensional equilibrium code VMEC is used to study the local stability of equilibria with given net toroidal currents. It is found that a subtractive current that decreases the rotational transform improves the stability, while an additive current that increases the rotational transform reduces the stability. The change of the rotational transform at the magnetic axis due to the net toroidal current is the essential mechanism for the change of stability. Mercier stability diagrams are given for the configurations of the Large Helical Device in which the plasma position is shifted inward or outward
For the large helical device (LHD), the nonlinear evolution of equilibria that are linearly unstable to ideal interchange modes is studied using the reduced MHD equations. At sufficiently low beta, each individual mode saturates without affecting directly the evolution of the other modes. They only couple through the modification of the averaged pressure profile. The change of the averaged pressure profile is limited to the local flattening near the resonant surfaces. At higher beta values and for the same initial pressure profile, a bursting phenomenon in the kinetic energy is observed. This bursting activity is caused by the overlap of multiple modes, which results in a global reduction of the pressure. However, increasing beta and using a pressure profile obtained from the nonlinear evolution at the lower beta suppress this bursting behaviour. This result indicates that the pressure profile can be self-organized so that the LHD plasma could reach a high beta regime through a stable path.
Remarkable progress in the physical parameters of net-current free plasmas has been made in the Large Helical Device (LHD) since the last Fusion Energy Conference in Chengdu, 2006 (O.Motojima et al., Nucl. Fusion 47 (2007. The beta value reached 5 % and a high beta state beyond 4.5% from the diamagnetic measurement has been maintained for longer than 100 times the energy confinement time. The density and temperature regimes also have been extended. The central density has exceeded 1.0×10 21 m -3 due to the formation of an Internal Diffusion Barrier (IDB). The ion temperature has reached 6.8 keV at the density of 2×10 19 m -3 , which is associated with the suppression of ion heat conduction loss. Although these parameters have been obtained in separated discharges, each fusion-reactor relevant parameter has elucidated the potential of net-current free heliotron plasmas. Diversified studies in recent LHD experiments are reviewed in this paper.
The driving and damping mechanism of plasma flow is an important issue because flow shear has a significant impact on turbulence in a plasma, which determines the transport in the magnetized plasma. Here we report clear evidence of the flow damping due to stochastization of the magnetic field. Abrupt damping of the toroidal flow associated with a transition from a nested magnetic flux surface to a stochastic magnetic field is observed when the magnetic shear at the rational surface decreases to 0.5 in the large helical device. This flow damping and resulting profile flattening are much stronger than expected from the Rechester–Rosenbluth model. The toroidal flow shear shows a linear decay, while the ion temperature gradient shows an exponential decay. This observation suggests that the flow damping is due to the change in the non-diffusive term of momentum transport.
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