The effect of ITER-like wall on runaway electron generation in JET

TL;DR

This study compares how different wall materials in JET influence runaway electron generation during disruptions, revealing that ITER-like walls significantly reduce runaway formation due to complex plasma and impurity interactions.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed numerical analysis showing how ITER-like wall materials alter runaway electron dynamics compared to carbon walls in JET disruptions.

Findings

Runaway electron plateau observed with carbon wall but not with ITER-like wall.

Slower current quench and negligible runaway current with ITER-like wall.

Higher Dreicer generation rate in carbon wall cases due to plasma and impurity effects.

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of the ITER-like wall (ILW) on runaway electron (RE) generation through a comparative study of similar slow argon injection JET disruptions, performed with different wall materials. In the carbon wall case, a runaway electron plateau is observed, while in the ITER-like wall case, the current quench is slower and the runaway current is negligibly small. The aim of the paper is to shed light on the reason for these differences by detailed numerical modelling to study which factors affected the RE formation. The post-disruption current profile is calculated by a one-dimensional model of electric field, temperature and runaway current taking into account the impurity injection. Scans of various impurity contents are performed and agreement with the experimental scenarios is obtained for reasonable argon- and wall impurity contents. Our modelling shows that the reason for the changed RE dynamics is a complex, combined effect of the differences in plasma parameter profiles, the radiation characteristics of beryllium and carbon, and the difference of the injected argon amount. These together lead to a significantly higher Dreicer generation rate in the carbon wall case, which is less prone to be suppressed by RE loss mechanisms. The results indicate that the differences are greatly reduced above ~50% argon content, suggesting that significant RE current is expected in future massive gas injection experiments on both JET and ITER.