Upgraded EAST starts experimental campaign
9 Feb 2012
The EAST tokamak has been extensively upgraded during its recent shutdown. The picture shows the first wall of the machine, whose tiles were changed from graphite to molybdenum at the beginning of this year.
With the advent of significantly augmented auxiliary heating and operational capabilities, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), situated in Hefei, China, is starting this year's experimental campaign. The campaign aims at exploring the boundary and understanding the physics of the EAST operational space with favorable stability and confinement, and developing suitable means to expand this space toward steady-state operation.
To these ends, the campaign is focusing on ion cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) and lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) physics, MagnetoHydroDynamics (MHD) and edge localized mode control (ELM), L-H transition and pedestal physics, divertor physics and emerging plasma-surface interaction (PSI) issues under long pulse operational conditions, and developing integrated scenarios that integrate high performance with advanced divertor steady-state operation.