Physics and engineering issues associated with edge localized mode control in ITER

An Unsupervised Spectrogram Cross-Correlation Method to Assess ELM Triggering Efficiency by Pellets

The high confinement mode (H-mode) is considered the optimal regime for the production of energy through nuclear fusion for industrial purposes since it allows to increase the energy confinement time of the plasma roughly by a factor of two. Consequently, it has been selected at the moment as the standard scenario for the next generation of devices, such as ITER. However, pressure-driven edge instabilities, known as edge localized modes (ELMs), are a distinct feature of this plasma regime. Their extrapolated thermal and particle peak loads on the plasma-facing components (PFC) of the next generation of devices are expected to be so high as to damage such structures, compromising the normal operations of the reactors themselves. Consequently, the induced loads have to be controlled; this can be achieved by mitigating ELMs. A possibility then lays in increasing the ELMs frequency to lower the loads on the PFCs. As already demonstrated at JET, the pellet pacing of ELMs is considered one of the most promising techniques for such scope, and its optimization is therefore of great interest for present and future operations of nuclear fusion facilities. In this work, we suggest a method to access primary pieces of information to perform statistics, assess and characterize the pacing efficiency. The method, tested on JET data, is based on the clustering (k-means) of convoluted signals, using so-called spectrogram cross-correlation, between the measured pellets and ELMs time traces. Results have also been obtained by taking advantage of a new type of diagnostic for measuring the ELMs dynamic, based on synthetic diamond sensors, faster than the standard spectroscopic cameras used at JET.