Mechanisms of disruptions caused by noble gas injection into tokamak plasmas

Abstract

Noble gas injection for disruption mitigation in DIII-D is simulated. The simulation of the first two stages of the disruption is performed: the first one is the neutral gas jet penetration through the background plasmas, and the second one is the instability growth. In order to simulate the first stage, the MHD pellet code LLP with improved radiation model for noble gas is used. Plasma cooling at this stage is provided by the energy exchange with the jet. The opacity effects in radiation losses are found to be important in the energy balance calculations. The magnetic surfaces in contact with the jet are cooled significantly; however, the temperature as well as the electric conductivity, remains high. The cooling front propagates towards the plasma centre. It has been shown that the cooling front is accompanied by strongly localized ‘shark fin-like’ perturbation in toroidal current density profile. The simplified cylindrical model shows that the cooling front is able to produce the internal kink-like mode with growth rate significantly higher than the tearing mode. The unstable kink perturbation obtained is non-resonant for any magnetic surface, both inside the plasma column, and in the vacuum space outside the separatrix. The mode disturbs mainly the core region. The growth time of the ‘shark fin-like’ mode is higher than the Alfven time by a factor of 10–100 for DIII-D parameters.