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Performing high-power long-duration discharges on Tore Supra has allowed us to investigate new physics at evanescent loop voltage in the situation where the current diffusion has fully taken place....

Closed loop control ofthe period offast ion stabilized sawtooth has been demonstrated for the first time on Tore Supra by varying the electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) injection angles in real time. Fast ions generated by up to 4 MW of central ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) increased the sawtooth period from the ohmic value of 25 ms to 60 to 100 ms. This sawtooth period was reduced to 30 ms by the addition of only 300 kW of ECCD. In ICRH heated shots where the normalized minor radius of the ECCD absorption location was swept from 0.4 to 0.05 in 4 s, the sawtooth period showed an abrupt change from 70 to 30 ms when the ECCD deposition normalized minor radius reached ∼0.2. This short period was then maintained until the absorption location moved well inside the sawtooth inversion radius at which point it abruptly returned to 70 ms. A closed loop controller was implemented that allowed the sawtooth period to be switched in real time between short and long sawteeth with a response time of the order of I s.

Reference CRPP-CONF-2009-047View record in Web of Science Record created on 2009-02-26, modified on 2017-05-12

Measurements of electron temperature fluctuations by means of correlation electron cyclotron emission (ECE) diagnostics aid in understanding the nature of the turbulent transport infusion plasmas. On Tore Supra tokamak, a 32-channel heterodyne ECE radiometer has been upgraded to include two channels for temperature fluctuation measurements. The central frequency of the yttrium iron garnet filter on each channel is remotely monitored by a driver, allowing one to shift the observation volume in the plasma radially. To resolve the fluctuation amplitude of 0.1%, integration times of similar to 3 s at 1 MHz sampling rate are required for the statistical error level of 0.05%. Together with the 32-channel profile radiometer, correlation ECE is a powerful and unique tool for simultaneous observation of the magnetohydrodynamic phenomena and studies of the plasma transport properties in various heating regimes during long-shot multimegawatt operation. First measurements of temperature fluctuations, of various origins, on Tore Supra (including the observation of the toroidicity-induced Alfven eigenmodes), as well as a description of the analysis methods used in the data evaluation, are reported in this paper.

This chapter reports the main physics results obtained with three radio-frequency-injection systems. The frequency of 8 GHz for the lower hybrid (LH) current drive (CD) (LHCD) system was chosen to explore CD at high density: full CD has been demonstrated for central densities up to 1.4 x 10{sup 20} m{sup -3} at 0.5 MA with an applied power up to 2.0 MW. The Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) database shows CD efficiencies from 0.1 to 0.3 x 10{sup 20} AW{sup -1} m{sup -2}. In combined experiments with electron cyclotron (EC) waves (140 GHz, up to 1.2 MW), a suprathermal absorption by the fast electron tail generated by LHCD has been observed in both downshifted and upshifted interaction regimes, with the resulting electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) ranging from 20 to 100 kA, depending on experimental conditions. With pure EC resonance heating, the narrowness of the radial power deposition profile has been exploited, resulting in strong local electron heating. Results in high-density regimes are also presented. The third system (433 MHz, 0.5 MW) is the first to test ion Bernstein wave (IBW) coupling with a waveguide antenna. The experiment operates at high frequency, avoiding the occurrence of nonlinear phenomena at the edge.more » Improved confinement regimes resulting in a central peaking of the pressure profiles have been achieved with P{sub IBW} up to 0.4 MW. Modeling and experimental results are summarized.« less