Journal
PHYSICS OF PLASMAS
Volume 26, Issue 5, Pages -Publisher
AIP Publishing
DOI: 10.1063/1.5091857
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Funding
- State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs-Foreign Talented Youth Introduction Plan [WQ2017ZGKX065]
- National Magnetic Confinement Fusion Science Program of China [2015GB101004]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41474143, 11775221]
- U.S. Department of Energy [DF-FG02-86ER53218, DE-SC0018001]
- U.S. NSF Grant [ACI-1053575, TG-ATM070010]
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For realistic values of the Lundquist number in tokamak plasmas, 1/1 magnetic islands lead to the formation of a secondary thin current sheet, which breaks up into a chain of small magnetic islands, called plasmoids. The role of plasmoid dynamics during the sawtooth reconnection process in fusion plasmas remains an unresolved issue. In this study, systematic simulations are performed to investigate the resistive internal kink mode using the full resistive magnetohydrodynamics equations implemented in the NIMROD code in a simplified tokamak geometry. For Lundquist number S >= 1.6 x 10(7), the secondary current sheet is found to be unstable to plasmoids during the nonlinear resistive kink mode evolution with a critical aspect ratio of the current sheet of similar to 70. The merging of small plasmoids leads to the formation of a monster plasmoid that can significantly affect the primary island evolution. This may provide an explanation for the partial reconnection observed in sawtooth experiments. Published under license by AIP Publishing.
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