O. Vallhagen I. Pusztai P. Helander S. L. Newton T. Fülöp
Pellet injection is used for fuelling and controlling discharges in tokamaks, and it is foreseen in ITER. During pellet injection, a movement of the ablated material towards the low-field side (or outward major radius direction) occurs because of the inhomogeneity of the magnetic field. Due to the complexity of the theoretical models, computer co…
PreprintS. Buller H.M. Smith P. Helander A. Mollén S.L. Newton I. Pusztai
High-Z impurities in magnetic confinement devices are prone to develop density variations on the fluux-surface, which can significantly affect their transport. In this paper, we generalize earlier analytic stellarator calculations of the neoclassical radial impurity flux in the mixed-collisionality regime (collisional impurity and low-collisionalit…
Preprint PublishedS. L. Newton P. Helander A. Mollén H. M. Smith
The accumulation of impurities in the core of magnetically confined plasmas, resulting from standard collisional transport mechanisms, is a known threat to their performance as fusion energy sources. Whilst the axisymmetric tokamak systems have been shown to benefit from the effect of temperature screening, that is an outward flux of impurities dri…
Preprint PublishedP. Helander S. L. Newton A. Mollén
A potential threat to the performance of magnetically confined fusion plasmas is the problem of impurity accumulation, which causes the concentration of highly charged impurity ions to rise uncontrollably in the center of the plasma and spoil the energy confinement by excessive radiation. It has long been thought that the collisional transport of i…
Preprint PublishedS. Breton F.J. Casson C. Bourdelle C. Angioni E. Belli Y. Camenen J. Citrin X. Garbet Y. Sarazin The JET contributors
Heavy impurities, such as tungsten (W), can exhibit strongly poloidally asymmetric density profiles in rotating or radio frequency heated plasmas. In the metallic environment of JET, the poloidal asymmetry of tungsten enhances its neoclassical transport up to an order of magnitude, so that neoclassical convection is expected to dominate over turbul…
PreprintJ. W. Connor R. J. Hastie P. Helander
A set of layer equations for determining the stability of semi-collisional tearing modes in an axisymmetric torus, incorporating neoclassical physics, in the small ion Larmor radius limit is provided. These can be used as an inner layer module for inclusion in numerical codes that asymptotically match the layer to toroidal calculations of the teari…
Preprint PublishedP. Helander F.I. Parra S.L. Newton
The bootstrap current and flow velocity of a low-collisionality stellarator plasma are calculated. As far as possible, the analysis is carried out in a uniform way across all low-collisionality regimes in general stellarator geometry, assuming only that the confinement is good enough that the plasma is approximately in local thermodynamic equilibri…
Preprint PublishedG. G. Plunk P. Helander P. Xanthopoulos J. W. Connor
We investigate the linear theory of the ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) mode, with the goal of developing a general understanding that may be applied to stellarators. We highlight the Wendelstein 7X (W7-X) device. Simple fluid and kinetic models that follow closely from existing literature are reviewed and two new first-principle models are presente…
PublishedP. Helander S. L. Newton
Existing numerical tools for calculating the MHD stability of magnetically confined plasmas generally assume the existence of nested flux surfaces. These tools are therefore not immediately applicable to configurations with magnetic islands or regions with an ergodic magnetic field. However, in practice, these islands or ergodic regions are often s…
PublishedJ. H. E. Proll P. Helander J.W. Connor G. G. Plunk
It is shown that in perfectly quasi-isodynamic stellarators, trapped particles with a bounce frequency much higher than the frequency of the instability are stabilizing in the electrostatic and collisionless limit. The collisionless trapped-particle instability is therefore stable as well as the ordinary electron-densitygradient- driven trapped-ele…
Published