Resistive wall mode identification by contrast enhancing technique of soft x-ray measurements on DIII-D

Abstract

A contrast enhancing technique (CET) for soft x-ray (SXR) measurements has been developed and tested for the early identification of the low amplitude resistive wall mode (RWM) on the DIII-D tokamak. The technique is simple and fast. It utilizes the chord-by-chord difference of low-pass digitally filtered time derivatives of the signals from the twelve-chord fan-shape soft x-ray arrays located at toroidal angles of 195° and 45°. The two arrays allow a demonstration of the CET method principle, although they cannot completely resolve the RWM structure. The time derivative of the x-ray signal amplifies the effect of the temperature perturbation convected by the RWM, while naturally incorporating the equilibrium evolution effect. The correlation with the parameters measured by other diagnostics, such as the radial magnetic field δBr from the magnetic probes, the radial profiles of plasma current density j, pressure p, and safety factor q from the motional Stark effect, the radial profile of the temperature perturbation ΔTe from electron cyclotron emission, the normalized beta parameter βN=βT(I/aB)−1, and the Dα light emission, confirm the early detection of the low-amplitude RWMs by the soft x-ray CET. Upon validation the SXR CET could be implemented into a multisensor scheme using other diagnostics for the real-time identification of RWM.