학술논문

Lithium splashing from flowing liquid lithium limiter and its effect on high confinement plasma performance in EAST tokamak
Document Type
article
Source
Nuclear Materials and Energy, Vol 25, Iss , Pp 100845- (2020)
Subject
Flowing liquid Li limiter
Splashing
Rayleigh-Taylor instability
EAST
Nuclear engineering. Atomic power
TK9001-9401
Language
English
ISSN
2352-1791
Abstract
To study the potential applications of liquid lithium (Li) as plasma facing material, the third generation of flowing liquid Li (FLiLi) limiter has been designed and successfully tested in EAST tokamak H-mode discharges in the 2018 run campaign. The stability of liquid Li on FLiLi surface, and Li splashing and its effect on the plasma performance are investigated in detail. Li splashing was observed in L-mode and H-mode discharges due to Rayleigh-Taylor (R-T) instability, resulting from electromagnetic forces J→×B→. Li splashing in low-parameter plasma decreased both core and edge electron temperatures, resulting in the degradation of plasma energy confinement and even H-L back transition, however, it almost did not influence plasma confinement performance in high-parameter plasma. These findings indicate that high-parameter plasma has higher tolerance to Li impurities than low-parameter plasma. By contrast, tungsten splashing from the melted layer on the upper divertor was also induced by the R-T instability but generally resulted in plasma disruption, which suggests lower tolerance to tungsten impurities in EAST tokamak.