Simulation of tungsten target erosion and tungsten impurity transport during argon seeding on EAST

The upgrade of experimental advanced superconducting tokamak lower divertor to use tungsten (W) target is undertaken, however the target erosion and W impurity accumulation in the core pose a great challenge during high power discharge with external impurity seeding. This paper aims to study the influence of argon (Ar) seeding on the target erosion and the W impurity transport on steady-state operation. The scrape-off layer/divertor plasma as well as W impurity are self-consistently simulated by using SOLPS-ITER code package. With the constant input power, the Ar seeding rate is varied to study the changes on divertor plasma, incident Ar flux, the target erosion and W impurity transport. The simulation results indicate that the external Ar impurity influences W target erosion through both reducing the plasma temperature and introducing heavier incident particles, which significantly complicates the erosion process. The eroded W flux has great impact on the W core accumulation, and the divertor plasma condition influences W impurity transport remarkably. A correlation between peak electron temperature (Te) at the outer target and the W concentration (CW) at the core-edge-interface is found. Moreover, the influence of the W impurity on the background boundary plasma is also evaluated.