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Abstract
Experimentally constrained equilibrium reconstructions are an important analysis tool used to understand the physics of magnetically confined plasmas. This thesis describes the first ever calculations of equilibrium reconstructions for spherical tokamak plasmas in the presence of lithium coated plasma facing components (PFC's) in the Current Drive eXperiment - Upgrade (CDX-U) device. Equilibria were calculated using a modified version of the Equilibrium and Stability Code (ESC), and were constrained by measurements made from a collection of magnetic field diagnostics. The ESC was modified to incorporate the first ever implementation of a novel response function technique for magnetic field diagnostic calibration. The technique is well suited for situations where the assumption of toroidal symmetry of the magnetic field is invalid, or when wall eddy currents are too large to neglect. Also included is a detailed discussion of the calculation of energy confinement time from power balance arguments, using parameters obtained from equilibrium reconstructions.
The energy confinement time, as derived from plasma equilibria, was as large as 6 milliseconds for plasmas in the presence of both solid and liquid lithium PFC's. This represents a significant improvement over baseline plasmas, which typically had energy confinement times of 1 millisecond or less. The energy confinement for plasmas with lithium PFC's also showed an improvement over that expected from the ITER98y1 confinement scaling, which is derived from a database of earlier tokamak results. The improvement in confinement over this scaling correlates with the observed increase in density "pump-out", which is indicative of low wall-recycling. Traditionally, plasma fueling has been dominated by wall-recycling, with 90% or more of the fuel coming from recycling sources instead of externally controlled means, such as gas puffing or pellet injection. Previous lithium wall coating experiments on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) resulted in a reduction of recycling at the wall and the highest ever energy confinement on TFTR. However, the TFTR experiments were complicated by the surface chemistry of solid lithium on carbon, leaving unanswered questions concerning the achievable plasma performance in a fully lithium coated environment.
