Simulation of runaway electron generation in fusion grade tokamak and suppression by impurity injection

Ansh Patel; Santosh P. Pandya

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arXiv · 2103.00325

Simulation of runaway electron generation in fusion grade tokamak and suppression by impurity injection

Ansh Patel·Santosh P. Pandya

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Abstract

During disruptions in fusion-grade tokamaks like ITER, large electric fields are induced following the thermal quench (TQ) period which can generate a substantial amount of Runaway Electrons (REs) that can carry up to 10 MA current with energies as high as several tens of MeV [1-3] in current quench phase (CQ). These runaway electrons can cause significant damage to the plasma-facing-components due to their localized energy deposition. To mitigate these effects, impurity injections of high-Z atoms have been proposed [1-3]. In this paper, we use a self-consistent 0D tokamak disruption model as implemented in PREDICT code [6] which has been upgraded to take into account the effect of impurity injections on RE dynamics as suggested in [4-5]. Dominant RE generation mechanisms such as the secondary avalanche mechanism as well as primary RE-generation mechanisms namely Dreicer, hot-tail, tritium decay and Compton scattering (from {\gamma}-rays emitted from activated walls) have been taken into account. In these simulations, the effect of impurities is taken into account considering collisions of REs with free and bound electrons as well as scattering from full and partially-shielded nuclear charge. These corrections were also implemented in the relativistic test particle model to simulate RE-dynamics in momentum space. We show that the presence of impurities has a non-uniform effect on the Runaway Electron Distribution function. We also show that the combined effect of pitch-angle scattering induced by the collisions with impurity ions and synchrotron emission loss results in the faster dissipation of RE-energy distribution function [7]. The variation of different RE generation mechanisms during different phases of the disruption, mainly before and after impurity injections is reported.

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Ansh Patel, Santosh P. Pandya. 2021-02-27. Simulation of runaway electron generation in fusion grade tokamak and suppression by impurity injection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00325

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