Session 7F - DIII-D: Edge and H-Mode.
ORAL session, Thursday morning, November 14
Vail Room, Adam's Mark
The ITER divertor design relies on operation of the machine with a detached divertor plasma as a means of reducing the divertor heat load to manageable levels. This operating mode has been seen on all of the world's diverted tokamaks, and is characterized by very low plate temperatures and ion currents. Experimental results on DIII-D have shown the plate electron temperature is between 1 and 2 eV. We describe the results of modeling these detached plasmas with the UEDGE code in this paper. Plasma detachment can be achieved in a variety of ways in the code as well as in experiment. Simulations indicate the detachment process occurs in two steps: a thermal collapse in which the plate temperature drops to 1 to 2 eV, followed by a decrease in the plate ion current. When the low temperature region extends off the plate, parallel momentum of the plasma is reduced by ion/neutral interactions. The plate ion current decreases when the parallel momentum is reduced sufficiently to permit volume recombination processes to compete with ion flow to the plate.