Particle exhaust studies in Tore Supra with a pump limiter

The aim of the Tore Supra pump limiter program is to study particle exhaust with a pump limiter system in long-pulse discharges with continuous pellet fueling and strong auxiliary heating. The pump limiter system consists of six vertical modules, located at the bottom of the machine, and one horizontal module at the outer midplane. The results presented here, were obtained with the horizontal module only. This module was equipped with two titanium pumps with a total pumping speed of 100000 L/s. The instrumentation of the limiter included pressure gauges, a residual gas analyzer, Langmuir probes, a spectrometer viewing the neutralizer plate for H_α and impurity measurements, and water calorimeters. All diagnostics have been commissioned and are operational. Initial results were obtained in low-density discharges, with no gas puffing during the shot. While only a modest effect on the plasma density was observed, large exhaust fluxes were measured in the pump limiter. The most likely source of this gas was outgassing of the graphite walls. Straightforward particle balance between the plasma efflux and the pump limiter exhaust, as applied in previous pump limiter experiments, did not apply. The core plasma and the edge plasma seemed to be largely decoupled and a multi-layer model is being developed to explain the experimental results.