Reduced kinetic modelling of shattered pellet injection in ASDEX upgrade
Journal article, 2025

Plasma-Terminating disruptions represent a critical outstanding issue for reactor-relevant tokamaks. ITER will use shattered pellet injection (SPI) as its disruption mitigation system to reduce heat loads, vessel forces and to suppress the formation of runaway electrons. In this paper we demonstrate that reduced kinetic modelling of SPI is capable of capturing the major experimental trends in ASDEX Upgrade SPI experiments, such as dependence of the radiated energy fraction on neon content, or the current quench dynamics. Simulations are also consistent with the experimental observation of no runaway electron generation with neon and mixed deuterium-neon pellet composition. We also show that statistical variations in the fragmentation process only have a notable impact on the disruption dynamics at intermediate neon doping, as was observed in experiments.

plasma simulation

plasma dynamics

Author

P. Halldestam

Max Planck Society

P. Heinrich

Max Planck Society

Gergely Papp

Max Planck Society

Mathias Hoppe

Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

M. Hoelzl

Max Planck Society

Istvan Pusztai

Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics

Oskar Vallhagen

Chalmers, Physics, Subatomic, High Energy and Plasma Physics

R. Fischer

Max Planck Society

Frank Jenko

Max Planck Society

Journal of Plasma Physics

0022-3778 (ISSN) 1469-7807 (eISSN)

Vol. 91 4 E104

Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)

Fusion, Plasma and Space Physics

Other Physics Topics

DOI

10.1017/S0022377825100470

More information

Latest update

8/7/2025 6