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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik

P 3: Magnetic Confinement II

P 3.4: Vortrag

Montag, 16. März 2026, 17:40–18:05, KH 02.016

Resilience of stellarator plasmas against thermal quenches induced by tungsten TESPEL injection — •Hjördis Bouvain¹, Andreas Dinklage¹, Naoki Tamura¹, Isabel Garcia-Cortes², Tomas Gonda³, Katsumi Ida⁴, Hiroe Igami⁴, Andreas Langenberg¹, Hiroshi Kasahara⁴, Kieran McCarthy³, Daniel Medina-Roque³, Keisuke Mukai⁴, Yoshiro Narushima⁴, Kian Rahbarnia¹, Chihiro Suzuki⁴, Yuki Takemura⁴, Tokihiko Tokuzawa⁴, Thomas Wegner¹, Mikiro Yoshinuma⁴, The W7-X Team¹, and The LHD Experiment Team⁴ — ¹Max-Planck-Institute for Plasma Physics, Greifswald, Germany — ²Laboratorio Nacional de Fusión, CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain — ³Auburn University, Auburn, USA — ⁴National Institute for Fusion Science, Toki, Japan

Plasma-terminating events, e.g. induced by the sudden influx of high-Z impurities due to mechanical failures, threaten the safe operation of large-scale fusion devices. Unlike tokamaks, in stellarators such an event cannot lead to a current disruption, but thermal quenches can still occur. To quantify the potential damage to plasma-facing components caused by the sudden energy loss, large amounts of tungsten were injected via TESPEL in W7-X and LHD plasmas. It was found that beyond a threshold of tungsten atoms and plasma parameters, impurity induced radiative losses along propagating cold fronts may induce termination. Close to this threshold, an intrinsic resilience to the perturbations was observed: despite energy losses up to ~90%, the plasmas recovered without external intervention. This underscores the improved robustness of stellarator plasmas to strong perturbations.

Keywords: tungsten; W7-X; LHD; TESPEL