Controllability study of EAST plasma vertical instability and improvement in future

In order to enhance control speed, each up/down Cu passive plate in EAST is cut into 8 pieces. These discontinuous plate segments are still connected to the inner vacuum vessel by steel supporting legs. A model of this plate segments-vessel-supporting leg loop is developed and verified by EAST vertical displacement event (VDE) experiments. The internal coil (IC) power supply requirements for VDE control are also evaluated. In particularly, we investigate the efficacy of internal control coil location to minimize the power supply capability. The IC power supply upgrade requirements for the optimized location and actual location are discussed. VDE experiments to evaluate maximum controllable vertical displacement (dZmax) were done with varying elongation and resulting EAST vertical controllability estimates are summarized here. These experimental results verified previous simulation results that present IC power supply capacity cannot provide robust vertical control.