Impact of the edge pedestal characteristics on the integrated performance in advanced tokamak operation modes in JT-60U

Characteristics of the edge pedestal has been studied for the high βp ELMy H mode and the reversed shear ELMy H mode in JT-60U. The contribution of the pedestal is around 20% for the confinement improvement factor, the normalized beta, and the bootstrap fraction. The upper boundary of the fusion performance measure increases with the pedestal poloidal beta, βp-ped. At high triangularity, δ, βp-ped increases with the total βp (βp − tot) almost linearly for positive shear type I ELMy discharges. This dependence is not due to the profile stiffness, since the dependence is the same for the discharges both with and without an internal transport barrier (ITB). In the reversed shear ELMy H mode, βp-ped increases with βp-tot on the same line as the positive shear cases except at high q95 = 8–9.3. In the high plasma current regime, the final structure with both an ITB and edge transport barrier seems to be determined by the balance between the expanding ITB-foot radius and deepening ELM penetration: the ELM penetration radius deepens with increasing pedestal stored energy and then reaches the ITB-foot radius. The ITB-foot seems to behave as a barrier against the ELM crash penetration, and shrinks after a few ELM attacks, and the ELM penetration follows the shrinking ITB-foot.