Collisional-radiative simulation of impurity assimilation, radiative collapse and MHD dynamics after ITER shattered pellet injection

Abstract

AbstractRecent studies suggest significant time delay between the Shattered Pellet Injection (SPI) fragment arrival and the temperature radiative collapse could exist in ITER, depending on the impurity assimilation and the plasma thermal reservoir. Hence in some cases the fragments could reach the core even before the edge radiative collapse occurs and triggers strong stochastic transport. This could be beneficial for heat load mitigation and hot-tail runaway electron suppression. To investigate the expected assimilation and radiation, thus the magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) response after SPIs in 3D, we carry out simulations of collisional–radiative impurity mixed SPIs into ITER L-mode equilibrium. Localized cooling around the fragments is found to cause current perturbations which destabilize MHD modes. Meanwhile, slower injections are found to result in stronger and more complete radiative collapse, thus stronger MHD amplitude. Due to theq = 1 surface enclosing a significant volume, the1/1resistive kink mode is shown to couple with outer modes to bring global stochasticity and convective core density mixing, although a transport barrier outside of theq = 1 surface prevents immediate temperature relaxation over the whole plasma. The impact of various physical assumptions and numerical treatments, such as the use of the flux-averaged ambient plasma parameters for ablation calculation, the exclusion of the magnetic constraining effect in ablation, the localization of the density source and the use of constant parallel thermal conduction instead of the Braginskii one and different injection velocities are also investigated. In general, stronger and more localized ablation results in stronger radiation, faster radiative collapse and a more violent MHD response, while the assimilation changes little due to a self-regulation effect.