Application of benchmarked kinetic resistive wall mode stability codes to ITER, including additional physics

Abstract

Leading resistive wall mode (RWM) stability codes MARS-K [Liu et al., Phys. Plasmas 15, 112503 (2008)] and MISK [Hu et al., Phys. Plasmas 12, 057301 (2005)] have been previously benchmarked. The benchmarking has now been extended to include additional physics and used to project the stability of ITER in a realistic operating space. Due to ITER's relatively low plasma rotation and collisionality, collisions and non-resonance rotational effects were both found to have little impact on stability, and these non-resonance rotational effects will also not self-consistently affect the ITER RWM eigenfunction. Resonances between thermal ions and electrons and the expected level of ITER toroidal rotation were found to be important to stability, as were alpha particles, which are not in rotational resonance. MISK calculations show that without alpha particles, ITER is projected to be unstable to the RWM, but the expected level of alphas is calculated to provide a sufficient level of stability.