Progress in the development of the ITER baseline scenario in TCV

Under the auspices of EUROfusion, the ITER baseline (IBL) scenario has been jointly investigated on AUG and TCV in the past years and this paper reports on the developments on TCV. It is found that the performance of TCV IBL is mainly limited by (neoclassical) tearing modes, in particular 2/1 modes which are triggered after a large ELM. It is demonstrated that the shorter the ELM period the larger βN at the NTM onset. We show that these modes can be avoided with central X3 EC heating at relatively high q95 and moderate βN. However, the lack of significant ECH at the high central densities obtained in TCV IBL scenario limits the duration of low q95 cases to about four confinement times. During this time, density usually keeps 28 peaking until (neoclassical) tearing modes are triggered. Nevertheless, the TCV IBL database covers the ITER target values (H98y2 ∼1, βN ∼1.8 at q95 ∼3) and a slightly better confinement than requested for ITER is reported. Integrated modelling results show that ITG modes are the dominant instabilities, and show that in TCV fuelling also plays a role to sustain peaked density profiles. The role of profiles, sawteeth and ELMs regarding MHD stability are also discussed.