Thermographic studies of outer target heat fluxes on KSTAR

A new infra-red (IR) thermography system with high spatial resolution has been installed on KSTAR and is now mainly applied to measure the outer divertor heat load profile. The first measurement results of the outer divertor heat load profiles between ELMs have been applied to characterize the inter-ELMs outer divertor heat loads in KSTAR H-mode plasmas. In particular, the power decay length (λq) of the divertor heat load profile has been determined by fitting the profile to a convolution of an exponential decay and a Gaussian function. The analysis on the power decay length shows a good agreement with the recent multi-machine λq scaling, which predicts λq of the inter-ELMs divertor heat load to be ∼1 mm under the standard H-mode scenario in ITER. The divertor IR thermography system has also successfully measured the strike point splitting of the outer divertor heat flux during the application of resonant magnetic perturbation (RMP) fields. In addition, it has provided a clear evidence that the strike point splitting pattern depends on the RMP fields configuration.