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$Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ is measured by two visible bremsstrahlung diagnostics on HL-2A tokamak, one of which uses a high spectral resolution spectrometer coupled with an electron multiplied CCD (temporal resolution of 100 Hz), and the other uses a filterscope system (temporal resolution of 1 MHz). The bremsstrahlung brightness measured by them coincides with each other very well. $\bar {Z}_{\mathbf {eff}}$ is systematically measured under different discharge conditions, such as divertor and limiter configurations, ohmic and auxiliary heating phases, before and after siliconization, and $L$ – $H$ transition. Under ohmic phase, $\bar {Z}_{\mathbf {eff}}$ is higher in the limiter configuration than that in the divertor configuration by a factor of ~1.5 under high-density regime. $\bar {Z}_{\mathbf {eff}}$ increases in all cases of auxiliary heating scenarios due to enhanced plasma–wall interaction, accompanied by influx increases of low ionization states of impurities such as C2+ and Fe1+ in plasma edge. Siliconization for wall conditioning is prominently effective in lowering the main impurity influxes in plasma edge and thus the impurity level, and a concentration of ~4% for carbon and ~0.2% for iron is roughly evaluated for a typical nonsiliconized plasma. A simple relationship that $Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ is positively correlated with $\Phi _{\mathrm {in}}$ and $\tau _{\mathrm {p}}$ is verified from the L- and $H$ -mode features, where $\Phi _{\mathrm {in}}$ is the impurity influx and $\tau _{\mathrm {p}}$ the particle confinement time. A nearly constant $\bar {Z}_{\mathbf {eff}}$ evolution is observed during $L$ – $H$ and $H$ – $L$ transition and it seems that $\bar {Z}_{\mathbf {eff}}$ is insensitive to $L$ – $H$ and $H$ – $L$ transition under some $Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ (0) threshold. The $Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ profiles are flat/weakly hollow in plasma core region (rho < 0.7) in case of low $Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ (0) and tend to be peaked when $Z_{\mathrm {eff}}$ (0) is larger than 3, which agrees with the neoclassical theory prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation conditions have been improved via developing new technologies and improving the hardware on HL-2A tokamak in recent years. The ECRH system has been upgraded to 3 MW/68 GHz, the supersonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) fuelling technique has been developed further, and clusters can be formed in the SMB by cooling the gas to around liquid nitrogen temperature, so that deeper penetration can be achieved. Moreover, there are about 30 kinds of diagnostics developed on HL-2A to measure the plasma parameters. These diagnostic systems include magnetics, microwave reflectometry, charge exchange recombination spectroscopy, Thomson scattering, FIR interferometer. Some of them were specially designed for the physics experiments. For example, a novel design of Langmuir probes was developed to study the 3-D structure of zonal flows. With these hardware development and improvement, new experimental results have been achieved in the fields of turbulence, transport, MHD instabilities, and energetic particle dynamics. In particular, the edge localized mode (ELM)y H-mode has been achieved by combining the auxiliary heating of NBI and ECRH, SMBI is beneficial for the L-H transition and the H-mode operation on HL-2A, and suitable for studying particle transport and controlling the ELMs during H-mode discharges due to its deep and local injection features and good controllability. In addition, the 3-D spectral structures of the low-frequency zonal flow and quasi-mode, which were predicted by theory and simulation, have been observed simultaneously. The beta-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (BAEs), excited by large magnetic islands (m-BAE) and by energetic electrons (e-BAE), are investigated, these phenomena are under further study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]