Simulation of co-existence of ballooning and kink instabilities in PLATO tokamak plasma

Magneto-hydro-dynamics (MHD) simulations are carried out for the first time with PLATO tokamak parameters to represent competition of plasma instabilities. The plasma equilibrium is evaluated with the vertical coil configuration in PLATO by using free boundary equilibrium code. The equilibrium is introduced from TASK/EQ to MHD simulations by MIPS code to calculate nonlinear saturation dynamics. In the simulation, a ballooning mode and kink mode both become unstable. We present the dependencies on plasma parameters to identify the instabilities. The ballooning and kink modes become unstable in the steep gradient region and at the safety factor q = 1 surface near the center of the plasma, respectively, so the nonlinear flattening of the pressure profile near the center is stronger in the kink case. The interaction between the modes affects the evolution of instabilities. (author)