Experiments at high elongations in DIII-D

In this paper we discuss the limitation to elongation observed in D-shaped plasmas in the DIII-D tokamak. We find that as the triangularity is increased and ell i is decreased that the n = O mode takes on an increasingly non-rigid character. Our analysis shows two aspects of the behavior: first, an increasing variation of the m/n = 1/0 component across flux surfaces and second, an increase in the relative amplitude of a m/n = 3/0 component which couples to the m/n = 1/0 component and further destabilizes the mode. In previous work we have reported on study of vertical control and the implementation of those results on DIII-D. In that study we used a single filament, with properties consistent with the radial force balance, to represent the plasma and employed an eigenmode description of the passive shell in order to allow time-ordering of the problem. The most important result of this study was that the active control coil must be positioned in the poloidal plane so as to minimize its interaction with the stabilizing shell currents. As a consequence of plasma toroidicity, these currents flow primarily in the outboard regions of the shell. Thus, control coils on the inboard side of the shell, near the midplane, are required. With such a spatial arrangement we can have radial fields from the active coil penetrating the shell on a time scale faster than the decay of the stabilizing shell currents. In accordance with these model calculations the control system for DIII-D tokamak has been modified resulting in operation to within a few percent of the ideal MHD limit for axisymmetric stability. In this work we refer to the ideal MHD limit as that of the plasma-shell system. The ideal limit can actually be reduced by a poor choice of the active control coils, however that is not the case for work discussed here. 7 refs., 6 figs