Characterization of plasma current quench during disruption in EAST tokamak

A preliminary analysis of plasma current quenching is presented in this paper based on the disruption database. It demonstrates that 26.8% of discharges have been disrupted in the last 2012 campaign, in addition, the plasma disruptive rate grows with the increase of plasma current. The best-fit linear and instantaneous plasma current quench rate is extracted from the recent EAST disruptions, showing that an 80%–30% interval of the maximum plasma current is well fit for the EAST device. The lowest area-normalized current quench time is 3.33 ms/m 2 with the estimated plasma electron temperature being 7.3 eV,∼9.5 eV. In the disruption case the maximum eddy current goes up to 400 kA, and a fraction of currents are respectively driven on the upper and lower outer plate with nearly 100 MPa–200 MPa stress in the leg.