Understanding of H mode pedestal characteristics using the multimachine pedestal database

With use of a multimachine pedestal database, essential issues for each regime of ELM types are investigated. They include (i) understanding and prediction of pedestal pressure during type I ELMs, a reference operation mode of a future tokamak reactor; (ii) identification of the operation regime of type II ELMs, which have small ELM amplitude with good confinement characteristics; (iii) identification of the upper stability boundary of type III ELMs for access to the higher confinement regimes with type I or II ELMs; (iv) understanding the relation between core confinement and pedestal temperature in conjunction with the confinement degradation in high density discharges. Both scaling and model based approaches for expressing pedestal pressure are shown to roughly scale the experimental data well and could be used to make initial predictions for a future reactor. q and delta are identified as important parameters for obtaining the type II ELM regime. A theoretical model of type III ELMs is shown to reproduce the upper stability boundary reasonably well. It is shown that there exists some critical pedestal temperature below which the core confinement starts to degrade. It is also shown that it is possible to obtain improved pedestal conditions for good confinement in high density discharges by increasing the plasma triangularity.