First Results of Pellet Injection Experiments on EAST

Abstract

A new pellet injection system was installed on the EAST tokamak and preliminary experiments were performed during the 2012 run campaign. Typical phenomena associated with deuterium pellet injection into a plasma discharge have been observed including sudden increases of the electron density and Hα/Dα emission intensity as well as a significant decrease in plasma electron temperature. Profiles have been studied in order to understand the influence of pellet fuelling on EAST discharges. Even though the injector was specifically designed for plasma fuelling, ELM triggering using the pellet injection has also been tested. In order to find appropriate parameters for triggering ELMs in H-mode plasmas, scanning of the pellet injection speed was employed for pellets injected from both the high field side and low field side of the plasma column. It has been observed that low-speed pellets injected into H-mode plasma from the low-field side could trigger an ELM followed by a number of smaller induced ELMs at about 300 Hz.