Mechanism and duration of the disruption thermal quench · revision history

Revision 2

Accepted · core change · record

Changes against revision 1:

Title
Mechanism and duration of the disruption thermal quench
Plain
In a disruption the plasma loses nearly all its heat in about a millisecond, much faster than normal leakage. How the magnetic field becomes tangled to allow this, and where the heat goes, is not predictable.
Precise · changed · core
Revision 1: Identify what sets the thermal quench duration (about 1e-3 s or less in large tokamaks): magnetic stochastization by global MHD modes, radiative collapse, and parallel heat transport in stochastic fields. Predict the quench time, the radiated versus conducted energy fraction and the wall heat-load distribution for ITER. An answer is 3D nonlinear MHD with validated kinetic heat-flux closures reproducing measured quench times across devices.
Revision 2: Identify what sets the thermal quench duration (about $10^{-3}$ s or less in large tokamaks): magnetic stochastization by global MHD modes, radiative collapse, and parallel heat transport in stochastic fields. Predict the quench time, the radiated versus conducted energy fraction and the wall heat-load distribution for ITER. An answer is 3D nonlinear MHD with validated kinetic heat-flux closures reproducing measured quench times across devices.
Settled by
3D nonlinear MHD simulations that reproduce measured thermal-quench times and radiation fractions on at least three tokamaks.
Kind
phenomenon
Answer type
mechanism
References
(empty)
Literature status
open
Status note
(empty)
Posed since
(empty)

Decisions