Radial effects in heating and thermal stability of a sub-ignited tokamak

The existence of thermally stable sub-ignited equilibria of a tokamak reactor, sustained in operation by a feedback-controlled supplementary heating source, is demonstrated. The establishment of stability depends on a number of radially non-uniform, nonlinear processes whose effect is analyzed. One-dimensional (radial) stability analyses of model transport equations, together with numerical results from a 1-D transport code, are used in studying the heating of DT-plasmas in the thermonuclear regime. Plasma core supplementary heating is found to be a thermally more stable process than bulk heating. In the presence of impurity line radiation, however, core-heated temperature profiles may collapse, contracting inward from the limiter, the result of an instability caused by the increasing nature of the radiative cooling rate, with decreasing temperature. Conditions are established for the realization of a sub-ignited high-Q, toroidal reactor plasma with appreciable output power (approx. = 2000 MW thermal)

Radial effects in heating and thermal stability of a sub-ignited tokamak

The existence of thermally stable sub-ignited equilibria of a tokamak reactor, sustained in operation by a feedback-controlled supplementary heating source, is demonstrated. The establishment of stability depends on a number of radially non-uniform, nonlinear processes whose effect is analyzed. One-dimensional (radial) stability analyses of model transport equations, together with numerical results from a 1-D transport code, are used in studying the heating of DT-plasmas in the thermonuclear regime. Plasma core supplementary heating is found to be a thermally more stable process than bulk heating. In the presence of impurity line radiation, however, core-heated temperature profiles may collapse, contracting inward from the limiter, the result of an instability caused by the increasing nature of the radiative cooling rate, with decreasing temperature. Conditions are established for the realization of a sub-ignited high-Q, toroidal reactor plasma with appreciable output power (approx. = 2000 MW thermal)