Simulation investigation of MHD instabilities in high βN H-mode plasma discharges of HL-2A tokamak

Abstract A stationary high normalized beta (β_N > 2) H-mode discharge was achieved in the HL-2A tokamak using pure neutral-beam injection (NBI) heating. While transient high performance occurred, β_N often plateaued near 3. To understand this limitation, magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities potentially limiting β_N were simulated in the edge and core regions using the MARS (the MHD Analysis of Resistive Spectro) and ExFC (the Extended Fluid Code) codes, respectively. MARS edge simulations