Effects of discharge operation regimes and magnetic field geometry on the in-out divertor asymmetry in EAST

Highlights: • The in-out divertor asymmetry is studied using SOLPS. • The discharge operation and the magnetic filed have a great influence on the divertor asymmetry. • The asymmetry is not obvious in low recycling regime as that in high recycling regime. - Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the reason why the divertor in-out asymmetry was not obvious as experimentally observed in EAST only considering the classical drifts from previous simulations (Guo et al., J. Nucl. Mater. 438 (2013) 280; Du et al., J. Nucl. Mater. 463 (2015) 485). With consideration of the classical drifts, a series of different typical discharge scenarios in EAST in different magnetic field geometries were simulated by using the SOLPS5.2 code package. The simulated results reveal that the classical drifts make a major contribution to the in-out divertor asymmetry in the high recycling regime (HRR) and partial detachment (one divertor target begins to detach, while the other divertor remains attached) regime. In comparison, in low recycling regime the classical drifts play a much smaller role in the contributions to the in-out divertor asymmetry, which can explain reasonably the reason for it in Guo et al. (J. Nucl. Mater. 438 (2013) 280). In addition, the magnetic field geometry also has a great impact on the classical drifts inducing the asymmetry; it is found that for lower single-null, upper single-null and connected double-null topologies, in HRR the classical drifts play an dominant role in the contribution to the in-out divertor asymmetry, while for a disconnected double null magnetic field configuration, they play a minor role, which is the reason why the in-out asymmetry was unobvious by considering the drifts in Du et al. (J. Nucl. Mater. 463 (2015) 485).