Mitigation of divertor heat loads by strike point sweeping in high power JET discharges

Deliberate periodic movement (sweeping) of the high heat flux divertor strike lines in tokamak plasmas can be used to manage the heat fluxes experienced by exhaust handling plasma facing components, by spreading the heat loads over a larger surface area. Sweeping has recently been adopted as a routine part of the main high performance plasma configurations used on JET, and has enabled pulses with 30 MW plasma heating power and 10 MW radiation to run for 5 s without overheating the divertor tiles. We present analysis of the effectiveness of sweeping for divertor temperature control on JET, using infrared camera data and comparison with a simple 2D heat diffusion model. Around 50% reduction in tile temperature rise is obtained with 5.4 cm sweeping compared to the un-swept case, and the temperature reduction is found to scale slower than linearly with sweeping amplitude in both experiments and modelling. Compatibility of sweeping with high fusion performance is demonstrated, and effects of sweeping on the edge-localised mode behaviour of the plasma are reported and discussed. The prospects of using sweeping in future JET experiments with up to 40 MW heating power are investigated using a model validated against existing experimental data.