Effect of passive plates on vertical instability in the EAST tokamak

The effect of passive plates on vertical displacement control in EAST tokamak is investigated by open loop experiments and numerical simulations based on a rigid displacement model. The experiments and simulations indicate that the vertical instability growth rate is reduced by a factor of about 2 in the presence of the passive plates, where the adjacent segments are not connected to each other. The simulations also show that the vertical instability growth rate is reduced by a factor of about 10 if all adjacent segments on each passive plate loop are connected to each other. The operational window is greatly enlarged with the passive plates.