Energetic/alpha particle effects on MHD modes and transport

Abstract

A nonvariational kinetic-MHD stability code (NOVA-K) has been employed to study TAE stability in TFRR D-T and DIII-D experiments and to achieve understanding of TAE instability drive and damping mechanism. Reasonably good agreement between theory and experiment has been obtained. In these experiments the dominant damping mechanism is due to both the thermal ion Landau damping and/or the beam ion Landau damping. Based on ITER EDA parameters, the TAE modes are expected to be unstable in normal ITER operations. Energetic particle transport has been studied using a test particle code (ORBIT). Energetic particle loss scales linearly with the TAE mode amplitude and can be large for TFRR and DIII-D for {delta}B{sub r}/B > 10{sup {minus}4} due to large banana orbit. From quasi-linear (ORBIT) and nonlinear kinetic-MHD (MH3D-K) simulations the saturation of TAE modes is due to nonlinear wave particle trapping and energetic particle profile modification in both radial and energy space. Finally, a convective bucket transport mechanism by MHD waves with time-dependent frequency is presented. Based on the energy-selective characteristics of the bucket transport mechanism, undesirable particles such as helium ash can be removed from the plasma core efficiently.