Internal disruptions and sawtooth like activity in Large Helical Device

Large Helical Device (LHD) inward-shifted configurations are unstable to resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) pressure-gradient-driven modes. These modes drive sawtooth like events during LHD operation. In this work, we simulate sawtooth like activity and internal disruptions in order to improve the understanding of these relaxation events and their effect over the device efficiency to confine the plasma, with the aim to improve the LHD present and future operation scenarios minimizing or avoiding the disadvantageous MHD soft and hard limits. By solving a set of reduced non-linear resistive MHD equations, we have studied the evolution of perturbations to equilibria obtained before and after a sawtooth like event in LHD. The equilibrium beta value is gradually increased during the simulation until it reaches the experimental value. Sawtooth like events and internal disruption events take place in the simulation for beta(0) values between 1% and 1.48%. The main driver of the sawtooth like events is the resonant and non-resonant effect of the (n = 1, m = 3) mode. The instability is stronger for resonant events, and they only appear when beta(0) = 1.48%. Internal disruptions are mainly driven by the (n = 1, m = 2) mode, and they extend throughout the whole plasma core. Internal disruption events do not show up when resonant sawtooth like events are triggered.

Internal disruptions and sawtooth like activity in Large Helical Device Articles