Extrapolation of ASDEX Upgrade H-mode discharges to ITER

Abstract

In this paper we discuss a procedure to evaluate the fusion performance of ASDEX Upgrade discharges scaled up to ITER. The kinetic profile shape is taken from the measured profiles. Multiplication factors are used to obtain a fixed Greenwald fraction and an ITER normalized thermal pressure as in the corresponding ASDEX Upgrade discharge. The toroidal field and the plasma geometry are taken from the ITER-FEAT design (scenario 2), whereas q95 is taken from the experiment. The confinement time is inferred assuming that the measured H-factor with respect to several existing scaling laws also holds for ITER. While retaining the information contained in the multi-machine databases underlying the different scaling laws, this approach adds profile effects and confinement improvement with respect to the ITER baseline, thus including recent experimental evidence such as the prediction of peaked density profiles in ITER. Under this set of assumptions, of course not unique, we estimate the ITER performance on the basis of a wide database of ASDEX Upgrade H-mode discharges, in terms of fusion power, fusion gain and triple product. According to the three scalings considered, there is a finite probability of reaching ignition, while more than half of the discharges require less auxiliary power than the one foreseen for ITER. For all the scaling laws, high values of the thermal βN up to 2.4 are accessible. A sensitivity study gives an estimate of the accuracy of the extrapolation. The impact of different levels of tungsten concentration on the fusion performance is also studied in this paper. This scaling method is used to verify some common 0D figures of merit of ITER's fusion performance.