Sensitivity of EMC3-EIRENE Divertor Heat Flux Calculations to Variations of Magnetic Geometry from Plasma Response Calculations (GPEC) for applied RMP in KSTAR

Good experimental agreement of a predictive model for Edge Localized Mode (ELM) suppression using Resonant Magnetic Perturbations (RMP) was observed at the Korean Superconducting Tokamak for Advanced Research (KSTAR) [J.-K. Park et al., Nature Physics 14 (2018)]. In this work the predicted ELM suppression window is computationally explored using a Field Line Analysis and Reconstruction Environment (FLARE) to calculate changes in the magnetic geometry and EMC3-EIRENE to calculate changes in the non-axisymmetric plasma edge solution and divertor heat flux. In the analysis, all plasma conditions are fixed except the magnetic field geometry which is a function of the RMP configuration and the subsequent plasma response, calculated by the Generalized Perturbation Equilibrium Code (GPEC). The calculated divertor heat flux is found to significantly change with the RMP definitions throughout the ELM suppression window, potentially advantageous for optimizing the divertor heat flux on ITER. However, the heat flux calculation was also found to be highly sensitive to the choice of the last rational surface in GPEC highlighting the importance of resolving a physically representative plasma response calculation for the purpose of making accurate heat flux predictions using EMC3-EIRENE.