Stabilization of ideal modes by resistive walls in tokamaks with plasma rotation and its effect on the beta limit

摘要

It is shown that pressure-driven, ideal external modes in tokamaks can be fully stabilized by resistive walls when the plasma rotates at some fraction of the sound speed. For wall stabilized plasmas, there are two types of potentially unstable external modes: those which are nearly locked to the wall and those which rotate with the plasma. For the modes rotating with the plasma, the stabilizing effect of the wall increases when the wall is brought closer to the plasma, while, for the wall-locked modes, the stabilization improves with increasing wall distance. When the plasma rotates at some fraction of the sound speed, there is a window of stability to both the wall-locked and the rotating mode. This window closes when beta exceeds a new limit which can be significantly higher than the wall-at-infinity limit. The stabilization depends principally on the toroidal coupling to sound waves and is affected by ion Landau damping. Two dimensional stability calculations are presented to evaluate the gains in beta limit resulting from this wall stabilization for different equilibria and rotation speeds. In particular, results are shown for advanced tokamak configurations with bootstrap fractions of (approx equal) 100%. (author) 14 figs., 25 refs. (Atomindex citation 26:009172)