Disruption mitigation and real-time detection of locked modes

Abstract

Disruptions are one of the largest problems facing tokamaks. In a large-scale experiment such as ITER, disruptions may cause crippling damage and severe setbacks in experimentation. One method for disruption mitigation involves the use of a gas jet which has been tested on both stable plasmas and vertical displacement events (VDEs) on Alcator C-Mod. In both cases, the jet was successful in mitigating disruption effects. The gas jet has not yet been tested on other types of disruptions. Locked-mode disruptions are easily created in C-Mod and could be used to test the effectiveness of the gas jet as a mitigation method if the jet could be fired early enough. It has been empirically observed that the electron cyclotron emissions (ECE) signal displays a flattening of the normally-present sawteeth before the current quench occurs in certain locked-mode disruptions. A procedure has been written which detects the ECE sawtooth suppression by calculating changes in the standard deviation of the signal over a moving time-window. This procedure has been programmed into the digital plasma control system (DPCS) for real-time testing. The procedure successfully located the locked modes present during a run.