CAUSES, PRECURSORS AND MECHANISMS OF DISRUPTIONS IN ASDEX UPGRADE

The technical cause of the disruption is often identified after the shot and the presumed cause is recorded in the Journal by the session leaders. The information contained in the Journal was supplemented by our analysis and the causes of disruptions have been subdivided in the categories listed in Table 1. The results of this analysis are positive: 1) we found an initiating event for all the disruptions analyzed; in addition 2) we found that most of the disruptions could be attributed to some technical external cause and could be classified as avoidable.