The penetration depths of different impurity pellets, such as carbon and neon, injected into different thermonuclear devices were reproduced by means of a single numerical code with the same set of assumptions, only the atom physical data being changed. All major characteristics of the ablation process were calculated: the spatial variation of the ablation rate, the depositon of ablated particles at a succession of magnetic flux surfaces, the expansion of deposited particles in the directions both parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field lines, and the temporal and spatial variations of the radiant power emitted by the expanding impurity cloud. The calculations were done by means of a time dependent quasi-three-dimensional code consisting of three modules accounting for the B⊥ and B|| expansions of the cloud and the traversing motion of the pellet, operated interactively and, when needed, iteratively. The radiation characteristics were computed by a collisional-radiative loss model, developed for low temperature light impurities, without the usual equilibrium assumptions. With some modifications, the code is adaptable to predictive pre-disruptive `killer pellet' scenario calculations for future large scale machines, such as ITER.

The phenomenon of striation observed during pellet ablation in hot magnetized plasma is investigated experimentally injecting aluminum micro-pellets into MT-1M and TEXTOR-94 tokamak and W7-AS stellarator plasmas. Changes in pellet cloud shape and temporal fluctuations of total emitted line radiations are studied. Special attention is paid to the investigation of the dependence of fluctuation frequency on pellet velocity. The results show that the light fluctuation frequency is characterized by a characteristic time rather than by a characteristic length, and that the striation is caused by a phenomenon that occurs during the evolution of the ionized-pellet cloud. The compatibility of these experimental observations with different theories of striation is discussed.

The ablation of carbon pellets injected into ECR-heated plasmas of Wendelstein 7-AS (W7-AS) has been investigated using a photographic technique with the aim of studying features of the ablation process in stellarator plasmas. The ablation rate profiles were measured assuming a proportionality of the C II radiation and the ablation rate. This assumption was confirmed experimentally and by simulations performed by a quasi-three-dimensional code. The fraction of continuum radiation, which is detected together with the C II line radiation (when using the light filters with finite spectral width), did not affect these measurements.No significant drifts of pellet clouds in the toroidal, poloidal and radial directions were observed in the C II line (723 nm) emission. From fast electron temperature measurements ( t = 10 µs) using ECE diagnostics, no indications of a pre-cooling wave were found.A difference between the ablation rates for discharges with low and high plasma density, which lies beyond the error bars, was observed. A specific zone of enhanced ablation was detected at the plasma periphery at high density. The appearance of such ablation enhancement, points to the existence of an additional local heat flux. However, the mechanism that could explain the enhanced ablation phenomena at high plasma densities remains unclear.

Cold-pulse experiments were carried out in the W7-AS stellarator for the first time. Carbon was injected by a laser blow-off system into the plasma edge. The electron density increase due to the injected carbon is found to be responsible for the edge electron temperature drop. In all cases, the propagation of the edge temperature perturbation to the plasma centre could be modelled with a local parameter-dependent electron heat diffusivity. Unlike in tokamaks, non-local transport effects were not observed in these experiments.