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Register a new userEdge Shear Flows and Particle Transport near the Density Limit in the HL-2A Tokamak
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Edge shear flow and its effect on regulating turbulent transport have long been suspected to play an important role in plasmas operating near the Greenwald density limit $ n_G $. In this study, equilibrium profiles as well as the turbulent particle flux and Reynolds stress across the separatrix in the HL-2A tokamak are examined as $ n_G $ is approached in ohmic L-mode discharges. As the normalized line-averaged density $ bar{n}_e/n_G $ is raised, the shearing rate of the mean poloidal flow $ omega_{rm sh} $ drops, and the turbulent drive for the low-frequency zonal flow (the Reynolds power $ mathcal{P}_{Re} $) collapses. Correspondingly, the turbulent particle transport increases drastically with increasing collision rates. The geodesic acoustic modes (GAMs) gain more energy from the ambient turbulence at higher densities, but have smaller shearing rate than low-frequency zonal flows. The increased density also introduces decreased adiabaticity which not only enhances the particle transport but is also related to a reduction in the eddy-tilting and the Reynolds power. Both effects may lead to the cooling of edge plasmas and therefore the onset of MHD instabilities that limit the plasma density.
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A new gas puff imaging (GPI) diagnostic has been developed on the HL-2A tokamak to study two-dimensional plasma edge turbulence in poloidal vs. radial plane. During a discharge, neutral helium or deuterium gas is puffed at the edge of the plasma through a rectangular multi-capillary nozzle to generate a gas cloud on the observing plane. Then a specially designed telescope and a high-speed camera are used to observe and photograph the emission from the neutral gas cloud. The brightness and contrast in the 2-D poloidal vs. radial frames reveal the structures and movements of the turbulence. The diagnostic was put into the first experiment during the latest campaign and successfully captured blob structures of different shapes and sizes in scrape-off layer (SOL).
Decay times of plasma flows and plasma profiles have been measured after a sudden biasing switch-off in experiments on the CASTOR tokamak. A biased electrode has been used to polarize the edge plasma. The edge plasma potential and flows have been characterized by means of Langmuir and Mach probes, the radiation was measured using an array of bolometers. Potential profiles and poloidal flows can be well fitted by an exponential decay time in the range of 10 - 30 microseconds when the electrode biasing is turn off in the CASTOR tokamak. The radiation shows a slower time scale (about 1 ms), which is linked to the evolution in the plasma density and paticle confinement.
Nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations have been conducted to investigate turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas with rotational shear. At sufficiently large flow shears, linear instabilities are suppressed, but transiently growing modes drive subcritical turbulence whose amplitude increases with flow shear. This leads to a local minimum in the heat flux, indicating an optimal E x B shear value for plasma confinement. Local maxima in the momentum fluxes are also observed, allowing for the possibility of bifurcations in the E x B shear. The sensitive dependence of heat flux on temperature gradient is relaxed for large flow shear values, with the critical temperature gradient increasing at lower flow shear values. The turbulent Prandtl number is found to be largely independent of temperature and flow gradients, with a value close to unity.
Understanding of the transport in a Tokamak plasma is an important issue. Various mechanisms have been reported in the literature to relate the core phenomenon to edge phenomenon. Sawtooth and Mirnov oscillations caused by MHD instabilities are generally observed in Tokamak discharges. Observation of these effects in the visible radiation from outer edge may offer a possible means to understand the transport.Oscillations in the visible radiation from outer region of the plasma have been observed during recent Aditya discharges. Percentage modulation of these oscillations vary with the Lines of Sight (LOS) of the chords and surfaces on which they terminate. This has been found in both the low frequency (~1 kHz) oscillations that seem to correlate with sawteething in SXR signals and the higher frequency (~10 kHz) oscillations that correlate well with Mirnov signals indicative of m/n=2/1 mode rotation. This suggests that the extent to which the MHD instabilities in the central region of the plasma column are reflected in the edge radiation depends on the interaction of the plasma with the surface at the extremity of the LOS. The release of particle/ energy accompanying the MHD instabilities leads to a large influx of particles from such surfaces. Cross-bispectral analysis suggests that a mode (having frequency of ~20 kHz) is also generated due to the interaction of m/n=1/1 (~10 kHz, seen in SXR) and m/n=2/1 (~10 kHz, seen in Mirnov, Visible & Microwave Interferometer signals). By possible selection rules, this mode seems to be a m/n=3/2 mode. This mode is seen in Mirnov, Visible & Interferometer signals. Behaviour of these oscillations on various LOS and their relation to SXR&Mirnov signals can lead to an understanding of the transport phenomenon. These observations and our interpretations will be presented.
The stochastic layer formation by the penetration of the resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) field has been considered as a key mechanism in the RMP control of the edge localized mode (ELM) in tokamak plasmas. Difficulty in quantifying the stochasticity has limited the assessment of the stochastic field effect in the pedestal transport to ambiguous inference from the pressure profile change. Here, we suggest the rescaled complexity for an effective measure of the stochasticity in the fluctuation and transport. This could be used to identify the narrow and localized stochastic layer around the pedestal top and estimate its width. We found that the fluctuation and transport in the edge plasmas become more stochastic with the more penetration of the RMP field into the plasma, which supports the importance of the stochastic layer formation in the RMP ELM control experiment.
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