Plasma response based RMP coil geometry optimization for an ITER plasma

Journal article, 2016

Based on an ITER 15MA Q = 10 inductive scenario, a systematic numerical investigation is carried out in order to understand the effect of varying the geometry of the magnetic coils, used for controlling the edge localized modes in tokamaks, on the plasma response to the resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) fields produced by these coils. Toroidal computations show that both of the plasma response based figures of merit - one is the pitch resonant radial field component near the plasma edge and the other is the plasma displacement near the X-point of the separatrix - consistently yield the same prediction for the optimal coil geometry. With a couple of exceptions, the presently designed poloidal location of the ITER upper and lower rows of RMP coils is close to the optimum, according to the plasma response based criteria. This holds for different coil current configurations with n = 2, 3, 4, as well as different coil phasing between the upper and lower rows. The coils poloidal width from the present design, on the other hand, is sub-optimal for the upper and lower rows. Modelling also finds that the plasma response amplitude sharply decreases by moving the middle row RMP coils of ITER from the designed radial location (just inside the inner vacuum vessel) outwards (outside the outer vacuum vessel). The decay rate is sensitively affected by the middle row coils' poloidal coverage for low-n (n = 1, 2) RMP fields, but not for high-n (n = 4) fields.