Effects of a sheared toroidal rotation on the stability boundary of the MHD modes in the tokamak edge pedestal

Aiba, Nobuyuki; Tokuda, Shinji; Furukawa, Masaru*; Oyama, Naoyuki; Ozeki, Takahisa

Effects of a toroidal rotation are investigated numerically on the stability of the MHD modes in the tokamak edge pedestal, which relate to the type-I edge-localized mode (ELM). A linear MHD stability code MINERVA is newly developed for solving the Frieman-Rotenberg equation that is the linear ideal MHD equation with flow. Numerical stability analyses with this code reveal that the sheared toroidal rotation destabilizes edge localized MHD modes, and this rotation effect becomes stronger as the toroidal mode number of the unstable MHD mode increases in case that the toroidal mode number is smaller than 40. Since the toroidal mode number of the unstable MHD mode strongly depends on the safety factor profile, the destabilizing effect of the toroidal rotation is affected by the safety factor profile. The sheared toroidal rotation also has an impact on the mode structure of the edge localized MHD mode, and the mode structure can become narrower as the toroidal rotation increases.