Salient issues of edge physics pertaining to loss of confinement: A resistive MHD analysis

The progress that has been made during this fiscal year is significant in the area of tokamak edge plasma transport. The drift-rippling mode model of edge turbulent transport was extended. In particular, the research areas on which they were concentrated include the following topics: (1) The theoretical investigation of the radiatively enhanced transport due to the effects of impurity driven radiation instabilities has been expanded to include a situation with multiple impurities (such as carbon, C(sup 4+), and oxygen, O(sup 6+)); (2) In order to validate the use of the impurity radiation input from the tokamak bolometer experiments in the theoretical edge turbulent transport calculations, the analysis that is utilized to transform impurity brightness data to radiated power profiles has been checked for state population and Abel inversion correctness; (3) The drift-rippling model of edge turbulent transport has been extended to include ionization particle sources in addition to the impurity driven thermal instability drive; and (4) The detailed limiter and realistic edge geometric effects on the edge turbulent transport has been included in the drift-rippling model.