Initial performance results of the DIII-D Divertor 2000

Abstract A major upgrade of the DIII-D divertor, with the goal of enhancing impurity and density control and increasing the thermal pulse length limit of advanced tokamak (AT) plasmas has been successfully completed and commissioned. The integrated system that includes independent cryopumps at both the inner and the outer legs of the divertor, private flux region and outboard baffles, and improved graphite divertor armor, has been successfully applied to a variety of plasma conditions. Comparison of similar discharges before and after the upgrades show that with the new divertor the core plasma neutral source and carbon content are lower by as much as 50%. Calculations supported by preliminary infra-red (IR) camera measurements show that the new graphite armor design increases the limit on the discharge duration, due to temperature of the tile edges reaching sublimation point, by an order of magnitude. With the new system we have been able to control the density of high confinement H-mode plasmas to less than 1/3 of the Greenwald limit. It is observed that with divertor pumping during the current ramp phase the wall particle inventory and consequently the density rise after the H-mode transition can be significantly reduced.