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2010
Thomson scattering measurements with subcentimeter spatial resolution have been made during a sawtooth crash in a Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak fusion plasma. The unparalleled resolution of the temperature profile has shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the sawtooth. As magnetic reconnection occurs, the temperature gradient at the island…
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2010
Two issues of the resistive wall mode (RWM) control code maturity are addressed: the inclusion of advanced mode damping physics beyond the ideal MHD description, and the possibility of taking into account the influence of 3D features of the conducting structures on the mode stability and control. Examples of formulations and computational results a…
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2010
Plasma rotation in tokamaks is of special interest for its potential stabilising effect on micro- and macro instabilities, leading to increased confinement. In MAST, the torque from Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) can spin the plasma to a core velocity ~ 300km.s -1 (Alfven Mach number ~ 0.3). Low density plasmas often exhibit a weakly non-monotonic sa…
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2010
MAST plasmas with a safety factor above unity and a profile with either weakly reversed shear, or broad low shear regions, regularly exhibit long-lived saturated ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities. The toroidal rotation is flattened in the presence of such perturbations and the fast ion losses are enhanced. These ideal modes, distinguish…
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2010
The sensitivity of the stability of the ideal n = 1 internal kink mode to variations in the plasma profiles is analysed both analytically and numerically in rotating tokamak plasmas. These stability analyses have been carried out including the centrifugal effects of toroidal plasma rotation upon the equilibrium, and also inconsistently when the equ…
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2009
The sawtooth control mechanism in plasmas employing off-axis toroidally propagating ion cyclotron resonance waves in tokamaks is reinvestigated. The radial drift excursion of energetic passing ions distributed asymmetrically in the velocity parallel to the magnetic field determines stability when the rational q 1/4 1 surface resides within a narrow…
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2009
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2009
Tearing mode stability is normally analysed using MHD or two-fluid Braginskii plasma models. However for present, or future, large hot tokamaks like JET or ITER the collisionality is such as to place them in the banana regime. Here we develop a linear stability theory for the resonant layer physics appropriate to such a regime. The outcome is a set…
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2009
Analytical theory and two different magnetohydrodynamical stability codes are used in a study of the effects of toroidal plasma rotation on the stability of the ideal, internal kink mode in tokamaks. The focus of the paper is on the role that the centrifugal effects on the plasma equilibrium play for the stability of this mode, and results from one…
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2009
The stability of ion temperature gradient ITG modes and the quasilinear fluxes driven by them are analyzed in weakly collisional tokamak plasmas using a semianalytical model based on an approximate solution of the gyrokinetic equation, where collisions are modeled by a Lorentz operator. Although the frequencies and growth rates of ITG modes far fro…
Showing 41 - 50 of 87 UKAEA Paper Results