Characteristics of the first H-mode discharges in KSTAR

Abstract

Typical ELMy H-mode discharges have been obtained in the KSTAR tokamak with the combined auxiliary heating of neutral beam injection (NBI) and electron cyclotron resonant heating (ECRH). The minimum external heating power required for the L–H transition is about 0.9 MW for a line-averaged density of ∼2.0 × 1019 m−3. There is a clear indication of the increase in the L–H threshold power with decreasing density for densities lower than ∼2 × 1019 m−3. The L–H transitions typically occurred shortly after the beginning of plasma current flattop (Ip = 0.6 MA) period and after the fast shaping to a highly elongated double-null divertor configuration. The maximum heating power available was marginal for the L–H transition, which is also implied by the relatively slow transition time (>10 ms) and the synchronization of the transition with large sawtooth crashes. The initial analysis of thermal energy confinement time (τE) indicates that τE is higher than the prediction of multi-machine scaling laws by 10–20%. A clear increase in electron and ion temperature in the pedestal is observed in the H-mode phase but the core temperature does not change significantly. On the other hand, the toroidal rotation velocity increased over the whole radial range in the H-mode phase. The measured ELM frequency was around 10–30 Hz for the large ELM bursts and 50–100 Hz for the smaller ones. In addition, very small and high frequency (200–300 Hz) ELMs appeared between large ELM spikes when the ECRH is added to the NBI-heated H-mode plasmas. The drop of total stored energy during a large ELM is up to 5% in most cases.