The driving and damping mechanism of plasma flow is an important issue because flow shear has a significant impact on turbulence in a plasma, which determines the transport in the magnetized plasma. Here we report clear evidence of the flow damping due to stochastization of the magnetic field. Abrupt damping of the toroidal flow associated with a transition from a nested magnetic flux surface to a stochastic magnetic field is observed when the magnetic shear at the rational surface decreases to 0.5 in the large helical device. This flow damping and resulting profile flattening are much stronger than expected from the Rechester–Rosenbluth model. The toroidal flow shear shows a linear decay, while the ion temperature gradient shows an exponential decay. This observation suggests that the flow damping is due to the change in the non-diffusive term of momentum transport.

A high speed tangentially viewing vacuum ultraviolet telescope system has been developed in the Large Helical Device (LHD), with the aim of investigating edge MHD activities. The spatial structure of low frequency (~0.75 kHz) MHD activity with poloidal∕toroidal mode numbers of m∕n = 1∕1 has been measured with this diagnostic.

The progress of physics understanding and concurrent parameter extension since the last IAEA-FEC 2012 [1] in the Large Helical Device is overviewed. High ion and electron temperature plasma (Ti(0) ∼ Te(0) ∼ 6 keV) with simultaneous ion and electron internal transport barrier (ITB) is obtained by controlling recycling and heating deposition. Associated with the formation of a transport barrier, a sign flip of the non-diffusive term of impurity/momentum transport (residual stress and convection flow) is observed. The impact of the topology of 3-D magnetic fields (stochastic magnetic fields and magnetic islands) on heat momentum and particle/impurity transport and MHD stability is also discussed. In the steady state operation, a 48 min discharge with a line-averaged electron density of 1×10 19 m −3 and with high electron and ion temperatures (Ti(0) ∼ Te(0) ∼ 2keV) resulting in 3.36 GJ of input energy is achieved.

A calorimetry system has been developed in Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). It is employed to evaluate the heat load exhausted by cooling water. Full poloidal coverage is achieved after the upgrade in 2019. The experimental results show that the heat load exhausted by cooling water is 64% - 86% of the injected energy. Moreover, the heat load increases faster in the case with a higher heating power, and this is qualitatively confirmed by the simulation. In addition, a longer time is required for the temperature of the cooling water to achieve its maximum for a higher heating power. And in the decay phase of the water temperature, it shows an exponential characteristic. The averaged time constant of the thermal decay obtained by exponential fitting for the upper and the lower divertor are 12.1 s and 107.9 s, respectively. It indicates that the heat removal capability of the upper tungsten divertor outperforms the lower graphite divertor.

A high-speed tangentially viewing vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) telescope system, using an inverse Schwarzschild-type optic system was developed to study fluctuations in the Large Helical Device (LHD). However, for the original system, the sampling rate was restricted to below 2000 Hz due to the low signal to noise (S/N) ratio in the experiment. In order to improve the S/N ratio, upgrade of the system was made. With this upgraded optical system, the maximum framing rate is improved to 6000 fps with a similar spatial resolution. Rotation of the m = 2 structure caused by the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instability is measured by the upgraded system. The spatial structure of the image is consistent with the synthetic image assuming the interchange mode type displacement of the flux surfaces.