Spontaneous mitigation of giant ELMs and appearance of grassy ELMs have been observed repeatedly at low pedestal collisionality ( ν e , p e d * ∼ 0.15 ) in the high-power (P inj > 13 MW) hybrid scenario in DIII-D. Higher β p and higher q 95 appear to be beneficial to achieving the grassy ELM regime. The grassy ELM H-mode plasma shows high energy confinement performance (H 98y2 up to over 1.5) under the conditions of high neutral beam torque and high core rotation. The pedestal width appears to exceed the EPED1.0 model prediction by more than 50%. Pedestal stability analysis performed with the ELITE code indicates that the stability against low-n kink/peeling modes is improved with increased auxiliary heating power and the operational point in the grassy ELM regime is located near the ballooning boundary. The pedestal stability characteristics during the grassy ELM crashes have been investigated in comparison with the giant ELM crashes based on plasma profiles experimentally measured with high resolution and accuracy. It has been found that the underlying mechanism for the observed small-amplitude ELM crashes is mainly the expansion of the ballooning stability boundary induced by an initial radially localized collapse in the pedestal, which helps to stop the growth of instabilities and further collapse of the pedestal. The effect of electron density pedestal on mitigating edge localized instabilities has been analyzed by numerical simulation, suggesting that the electron density pedestal characterized by high n e,sep/n e,ped and low density gradient helps to stabilize peeling-ballooning modes because of a low pressure pedestal gradient and to lower the ballooning boundary mainly because of a low ion diamagnetic frequency in the pedestal region, thus triggering ballooning instabilities and producing the intrinsic grassy ELMs. Numerical simulation of the Chinese fusion engineering test reactor (CFETR) with the SOLPS code indicates that the separatrix density might be insensitive to the electron diffusivity in the pedestal region and increase with the power flowing from the core region to the edge region. Pedestal stability analysis suggests that the flat density pedestal with high separatrix density obtained in the high-power plasma in CFETR would make the operational point close to the ballooning boundary, which is considered to help destabilize ballooning instabilities and facilitate the access to the grassy ELM regime.

A dual gas puff imaging (GPI) system has been successfully assembled on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) and applied for the study of the dithering L-H transition in the 2012 spring campaign. A new method i.e., the dynamic programming based time-delay estimation technique, has been applied to the 64 × 64 pixels GPI video images to yield time-dependent two-dimensional velocity fields at the plasma edge on EAST. Local poloidal flow velocities up to ∼−3 km s −1 (in the electron diamagnetic direction) and radial flow velocities up to ∼−2 km s −1 (inward) are found inside the separatrix during a dithering burst. The radial and poloidal cross-correlation length, flow velocity and auto-correlation time inside the separatrix increase preceding the dithering burst and decrease following the dithering burst. These observations provide strong evidence for the shear flows playing an important role during the dithering L-H transition.

One of the critical challenges for long pulse operation of ITER and future fusion reactors is the excessively high heat and particle fluxes on the divertor targets. The divertor detachment offers an effective way for the control of steady state heat flux and erosion at the divertor target. Dedicated experiments have been systematically performed for both H-mode and L-mode plasmas on EAST with ITER-like W divertor in the last two years to further advance detachment physics understanding. The detachment is identified by the rollover of divertor peak particle flux near the strike point during the density ramping up, which correlates with the reduction of electron temperature down to 5 eV, the increase of D δ /D α ratio and radiated power. It has been demonstrated that the more closed divertor has a lower density threshold at the onset of detachment on EAST. Furthermore, the detachment density threshold will be reduced when the strike point moves towards the divertor corner. The onset of detachment exhibits a strong asymmetry between inner and outer targets, with the inner target accessing detachment at lower density due to the lower electron temperature, as expected. The effects of the heating power and plasma current on the detachment onset were also investigated. The experimental results show that the density at detachment onset is lower in L-mode relative to H-mode, and increases with the heating power. The detachment density threshold normalized to the Greenwald density limit is lower at a high plasma current.