On fully three-dimensional resistive wall mode and feedback stabilization computations

Resistive walls, located close to the plasma boundary, reduce the growth rates of external kink modes to resistive time scales. For such slowly growing resistive wall modes, the stabilization by an active feedback system becomes feasible. The fully three-dimensional stability code STARWALL, and the feedback optimization code OPTIM have been developed [P. Merkel and M. Sempf, 21st IAEA Fusion Energy Conference 2006, Chengdu, China (International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, 2006, paper TH/P3-8] to compute the growth rates of resistive wall modes in the presence of nonaxisymmetric, multiply connected wall structures and to model the active feedback stabilization of these modes. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the codes and to study the effect of the toroidal mode coupling caused by multiply connected wall structures, the codes are applied to test equilibria using the resistive wall structures currently under debate for ITER [M. Shimada et al., Nucl. Fusion 47, S1 (2007)] and ASDEX Upgrade [W. Koeppendoerfer et al., Proceedings of the 16th Symposium on Fusion Technology, London, 1990 (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1991), Vol. 1, p. 208]