Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) aims to demonstrate steady-state advanced high-performance H-mode plasmas with an ITER-like configuration, plasma control and heating schemes. The plasma-facing components in EAST are actively cooled, providing good conditions for researching long-pulse and high-energy discharges. A long-pulse high-performance plasma discharge (#59892 discharge) of up to 103 s with a core electron temperature of up to 4.5 keV was sustained with an injected energy exceeding 0.22 GJ in the 2015–2016 experimental campaign. A calorimetric measurement utilizing the temperature increment of cooling water is carried out to calculate the heat load on the strike point region of the lower divertor during long-pulse discharges in EAST. For the long-pulse and high-energy discharges, the comparison of the measurement results for the heat load measured by divertor Langmuir probes and the calorimetry diagnostic indicates that most of the heat load is delivered to the divertor panels as plasma, not radiation, and charge exchange neutrals. The ratio of the heat load on the strike point region of the lower divertor to the total injected energy is on average 42.5% per discharge with the lower single null divertor configuration. If the radiated energy loss measured by the fast bolometer diagnostic is taken into consideration, the ratio is found to be 61.6%. The experimental results and the analysis of the physics involved in these discharges are reported and discussed.
Discharge duration limits of contemporary tokamaks and stellarators