Reduction of impurity confinement time by combined heating of LHW and ECRH in EAST* *Project supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFE031110 and 2017YFE0301205), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11905146, 11775269, and 11805113), the Users with Excellence Program of Hefei Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. 2019HSC-UE014),

Abstract

The core impurity confinement properties are experimentally investigated in the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) plasma heated by lower hybrid wave (LHW) and electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) (LHW+ECRH). It is shown that the impurity confinement time (τ imp) in the L-mode plasma jointly heated by LHW and ECRH is weakly dependent on electron density but strongly dependent on the heating power, thus it is shorter than that in LHW-only heated L-mode plasma with the similar plasma parameters. The combined heating of LHW and ECRH can reduce the collisionality and indicates a more effective heating method for core τ imp reduction and normalized poloidal beta (β P) improvement. It should be emphasized that in this high β P operation window the small ELM regime can be accessed, and an L-mode level τ imp (40 ms–80 ms) and high β N (∼ 1.7) can be obtained simultaneously. It means that this typical small ELMy H-mode regime has an advantage in avoiding the serious tungsten accumulation, and will be competitive in future long-pulse steady-state and high-performance operation with high-Z material plasma-facing components.