† Corresponding author. E-mail:
Project supported by the National Magnetic Confinement Fusion Science Program of China (Grant Nos. 2013GB112004 and 2015GB103002), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11405212 and 11261140328), and the Major Program of Development Foundation of Hefei Center for Physical Science and Technology China (Grant No. 2016FXZY008).
Using a tangentially viewing x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer, substantial co-current rotation driven by lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) at 4.6 GHz is observed on EAST tokamak. This study presents plasma rotation behaviors with 4.6 GHz LHCD injection. Typically, the 10–20 km/s co-current rotation change and the transport of rotation velocity from edge to core are observed. The relationship between plasma parameters and rotation is also investigated, indicating that rotation decreases with increasing internal inductance (li) and increases with increasing safety factor (q0). Hysteresis between rotation and Te plasma stored energy is observed, suggesting different response times between the electron heating and rotation acceleration by LHCD. A comparison between the rotations driven by 4.6 G LHCD and 2.45 G LHCD on EAST is also presented, in which higher frequency LHCD could induce more rotation changes.
Rotation and its shear play important roles in tokamak plasmas since they can reduce the MHD instabilities[1,2] and enhance the confinement.[3,4] At present, rotation is driven mostly by direct neutral beam injection (NBI) momentum injection in most tokamak devices, which is predicted to not be efficient on ITER and future reactors because of the large machine size, high plasma density, and high beam energy.[5] Hence, the study of the rotation without external momentum injection, the so-called “intrinsic rotation”, is important for improving predictions for plasma rotation in ITER and future fusion reactors. As one of the intrinsic rotation driving methods, LHCD-driven rotation has been reported on Alcator C-mod,[6–8] JT-60U,[9] Supra Tore,[10,11] and EAST[12] to induce significant toroidal rotation either in co- or counter-current.
The mechanism for LHCD rotation driving has been studied extensively and several key means were proposed. Change in residual stress through its dependence on magnetic shear was thought to be one of the driven mechanisms in both Supra Tore and Alcator C-mod.[6,10] A radial electric field created by the ripple-induced loss of thermal electrons could also drive rotation via the radial force balance equation.[10] Additionally, the radial electric field can also be generated by the outward motion of the electrons, which are driven by balancing the parallel momentum deposited in fast resonant electrons.[13–15] The LH wave injected momentum is one of the considered mechanisms, but this was calculated to be small.[6–10] Pfirsch-Schluter (PS) flows, which may be caused by the fast change of edge rotation, could induce drift flows in toroidal geometry.[12] As there remains much work to do on the LHCD rotation driving mechanisms, more experimental results in different devices should be analyzed for the more precise understanding of the LH-driven rotation.
On EAST, LHCD induced plasma rotation was studied for 2.45 GHz LHCD system previously.[12] A new 4.6 GHz LHCD system was deployed on EAST[16,17] in 2014, which provided new resources for plasma rotation studies at different LHCD frequencies.[18] Besides, with the improvement of the diagnostics on EAST, more information during LHCD injection became available. In this paper, the typical characteristics of the 4.6 GHz LHCD-driven rotation are presented. The preliminary analyses of LHCD induced rotation and its dependence on plasma parameters are performed.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section
The experiments on plasma rotation were performed on EAST, which is equipped with fully superconducting magnets (major radius R ~ 1.85 m, minor radius a ~ 0.45 m, magnetic field Bt0 < 3.5 T, plasma current Ip < 1 MA) with flexible magnetic configurations (diverted and limited) and advanced wall conditioning techniques for long-pulse high-performance operations.[16,17] In addition to the existing 2.45 GHz LHCD system, a new LHCD system operating at 4.6 GHz, capable of delivering up to 6 MW source power with the parallel index of refraction n|| in the range 1.8–2.23 was successfully commissioned in 2014.[19] Toroidal rotation was measured by the tangential high-resolution x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer (XCS), based on the Doppler shift of helium-like argon line (Ar XVII) in a wavelength range from 3.9494 Å to 3.9944 Å.[20,21] Typical time and spatial resolution for XCS are 10–100 ms and 1 cm, respectively. Electron temperature and density (ρ = 0–1.1) are obtained from Thomson scattering (TS) with spatial resolution up to ~ 1.0 cm and time resolution up to 20 ms.[22–24]
Development of the 4.6 GHz LHCD system on EAST adds the extra capability for non-inductive current drive, which also provides a tool for studying RF-driven rotation physics. Shown in Fig.
Figure
A comparison of LHCD rotation drive among different frequencies is carried out by injecting LHCDs of 2.45 GHz and 4.6 GHz at different times during the L-mod discharge.[18] Figure
The profiles of the electron temperature, ion temperature and change of toroidal rotation in three conditions (ohmic condition, 2.45 GHz LHCD injection and 4.6 GHz LHCD injection) of this discharge are displayed in Fig.
![]() | Fig. 4. (color online) Profiles of (a) electron temperature, (b) ion temperature, and (c) change in toroidal rotation under three different discharge conditions. |
In Fig.
To further study the parametric dependence, the relationships between rotation increment and various parameters during the three shots are obtained and summarized in Fig.
With the improvement of the XCS system, the relationship between the increment of co-current toroidal rotation and the decrement in the internal inductance li, which is used to characterize the broadening of the current density profile induced by LHCD, is observed as shown in Fig.
The experimental observations described above are similar to those of C-Mod,[6–8] JT-60U,[9] and Tore Supra.[10,11] Upon the upgrade of the diagnostic, the rotation evolution after LHCD injection can be observed. According to the observations of the time scale of the change on rotation, the direct mechanism for driving rotation for example, LH wave injected momentum, which contributes a small increment in counter-current direction,[10,11] is not the key factor in EAST. Like the results in the 2.45 GHz LHCD discharges,[12] the different time scales of change of the edge and core rotation show that the edge rotation may be the source of core rotation. The observed rotation change induced by LHCD is in the co-current direction and the amplitude is related to the power of the LHCD. One candidate mechanism is that the formation of the positive radial electric field induced by the injection of the LHCD[9–15] in the LHCD deposition region provides a co-current rotation drive force and then the change of the rotation transfers to the whole profile through momentum transport.
In summary, up to ~ 20 km/s the co-current rotation increment is observed in the 4.6 GHz LHCD discharge. The rotation is transferred from the edge to the core region and increases with LHCD power increasing. The magnitude of the rotation is observed to increase with the electron temperature and stored energy increasing, and hysteresis between the parameters is observed. The hysteresis shows that the LHCD drive rotation is mainly in an indirect way. The rotation is well correlated with changes in the internal inductance, which is similar to the results of the C-mod experiment but in a different direction. Compared with the 2.45 GHz LHCD, 4.6 GHz LHCD can induce a slightly large rotation increment at the same power.
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