#234
Radiation characteristics of SPI-induced disruptions in ASDEX Upgrade and their IP-spike height
Oral
Paul Heinrich (Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Garching, Germany)
G. Papp, J. Artola, M. Bernert, P. de Marné, M. Dibon, T. Eberl, O. Ficker, S. Jachmich, M. Lehnen, M. Maraschek, T. Peherstorfer, N. Schwarz, U. Sheikh, B. Sieglin, J. Svoboda, the ASDEX Upgrade Team and the EUROfusion Tokamak Exploitation Team
Abstract
In the 2022 experiments, a large scan in the shattered pellet injection (SPI) parameters was performed. This allowed us to study the effect of different fragment size & velocity distributions on the disruptions including their radiation characteristics.
By varying the neon content and fragmentation parameters of the pellets, we observed an evolution from conduction dominated to radiation dominated disruptions [^1][^2]. This transition is accompanied by a reduction of the plasma current spike (IP-spike) height [^1] and toroidal peaking factor (TPF) of the radiation [^2], measured in 5 different toroidal positions. However, the TPF on its own was found to be insufficient to fully describe the radiation asymmetries. While the TPF decreases with increasing neon content in the pellets, the asymmetry between the more distant sectors S5 ("perpendicular" w.r.t. the injection sector 16) and S9 ("opposite") was found to increase.
Additionally, the asymmetry between the neighboring sectors S1/S15 of the injection seems to be influenced by the injection parameters, indicating a preferred propagation direction in either co-/counter-current direction, respectively [^2].
We observed that the height of the IP-spike is linearly dependent on the amount of radiation during/around the thermal quench (TQ) [^1]. Hereby, the height is determined by the battle between the changing plasma internal inductance ($l_i$) during the TQ (increasing IP) and the radiated power during the early CQ (decreasing IP) [^1].
---
References
[^1]: P. Heinrich, et al., submitted to Nuclear Fusion, Evolution of SPI-induced disruptions in ASDEX Upgrade, 2026. Pre-print available at <https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.05488>.
[^2]: P. Heinrich, Shattered pellet injection studies at the tokamak ASDEX Upgrade, Dissertation at Technical University Munich (TUM), 2025. Available at <https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/1767878>.