Disruption mitigation using high pressure gas jets

Abstract

The goal of this research is to establish credible disruption mitigation scenarios based on the technique of massive gas injection. Disruption mitigation seeks to minimize or eliminate damage to internal components that can occur due to the rapid dissipation of thermal and magnetic energy during a tokamak disruption. In particular, the focus of present research is extrapolating mitigation techniques to burning plasma experiments such as ITER, where disruption-caused damage poses a serious threat to the lifetime of internal vessel components. A majority of effort has focused on national and international collaborative research with large tokamaks: DIII-D, Alcator C-Mod, JET, and ASDEX Upgrade. The research was oriented towards empirical trials of gas-jet mitigation on several tokamaks, with the goal of developing and applying cohesive models to the data across devices. Disruption mitigation using gas jet injection has proven to be a viable candidate for avoiding or minimizing damage to internal components in burning plasma experiments like ITER. The physics understanding is progress towards a technological design for the required gas injection system in ITER.