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This study examines disruptions induced by shattered pellet injection (SPI) systems at the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak to inform the design of ITER's disruption mitigation system. Researchers characterized seven distinct phases of SPI-induced disruptions and identified that increasing neon assimilation in the plasma changes disruption behavior from poorly mitigated (convex current decay) to well mitigated (concave, radiation-dominated current decay). The experiments achieved pre-thermal quench durations ranging from 0.5 to 15 milliseconds and early current quench durations between 8.2 and 13.3 milliseconds depending on injection parameters.
Why it matters
Disruptions pose a critical threat to future fusion reactors like ITER, potentially causing severe thermal loads and mechanical forces that could damage the machine. This research provides essential experimental data to optimize the disruption mitigation system for ITER, which is crucial for protecting the multi-billion dollar facility and enabling commercial fusion energy development.
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arXiv:2604.05488v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Disruptions are a major concern for future fusion reactors based on the tokamak principle. To ensure machine protection, the thermal loads and vessel forces that arise during disruptions have to be mitigated reliably. For the ITER disruption mitigation system (DMS), the shattered pellet injection (SPI) technology has been selected. It can provide a prompt delivery of the injection material into the plasma core, with the mitigation efficiency depending on fragment size and velocity. A highly flexible SPI system was built and installed at the tokamak ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) to aid the finalization process of the ITER DMS and provide crucial input for modeling. The SPI-induced disruptions in the 2022 AUG experiments follow a typical chain of events, which are discussed in this paper: The first light, main fragment arrival, plasma movement event, MARFE, thermal quench/plasma current spike, current quench, and vertical displacement event phase. Depending on the injection parameters, these phases may vary significantly or some might not be present at all. In this paper, we will focus on the characterization of these disruption phases and figures of merit for the mitigation efficiency, depending on the SPI configuration. With increasing amount of assimilated neon in the plasma – primarily influenced by the neon content in the pellet but also the shattering parameters – the disruptions exhibit different behaviors. This disruption evolution seems to be a continuous process, with the most prominent feature being the changing disruption time scales and plasma current time trace shape during the CQ from convex (poorly or unmitigated) $rightarrow$ concave (well mitigated/radiation dominated). Depending on the injection, pre-TQ durations between 15 – 0.5 ms and early CQ durations ($Delta textrm{t}_textrm{CQ}^{100 rightarrow 80}$) between 13.3 – 8.2 ms had been achieved at AUG.
Source: Evolution of SPI-induced disruptions in ASDEX Upgrade