Pellets injected into type-I ELMy H-mode discharges are known to trigger edge-localized modes (ELMs). In order to understand the underlying processes the triggering mechanism was investigated in this paper. The major questions of the investigations to be answered were: at which magnetic surface was the ELM initiated and what was the corresponding perturbation caused by the ablating pellet? During the investigations the natural ELM cycle was probed by injecting pellets from the high field side of the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak with significantly lower frequency than the natural ELM frequency. To determine the location of the seed perturbation of the ablating pellet triggering an ELM, the dynamics of the triggered ELMs was linked to the time history of the pellet position in the plasma. The ELM onset was determined by analysing magnetic pick-up coil signals and its delay relative to the time when the pellet crossed the separatrix was measured as a function of the pellet velocity. Supposing that to trigger an ELM a pellet has to reach a certain magnetic surface of the plasma independently of its mass and velocity, the most probable location of the seed perturbation was found to be at the middle of the pedestal—at the high plasma pressure gradient region. The onset of the MHD signature of the ELMs was detected about 50 µs after the pellet reached the seed position. According to our observations ELMs can be triggered either by the cooling of the pedestal region causing sudden increase of the pedestal plasma pressure gradient driving the plasma to the unstable region of the ballooning mode or by the strong MHD perturbation triggering an instability developing into an ELM.
Investigations on the ELM cycle by local 3D perturbation experiments