Cold-pulse experiments were carried out in the W7-AS stellarator for the first time. Carbon was injected by a laser blow-off system into the plasma edge. The electron density increase due to the injected carbon is found to be responsible for the edge electron temperature drop. In all cases, the propagation of the edge temperature perturbation to the plasma centre could be modelled with a local parameter-dependent electron heat diffusivity. Unlike in tokamaks, non-local transport effects were not observed in these experiments.
The local nature of the plasma response to cold pulses with electron and ion heating at ASDEX Upgrade
Transient electron heat diffusivity obtained from trace impurity injection on TFTR