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In order to obtain enhanced plasma parameters a complete new tokamak HL-2M is now under construction in Southwestern Institute of Physics. To assure the structural safety of the device for the entire operation cycle, one of the most important issues is the lifetime-limiting effects due to the pulsed operation mode. Fatigue is one of the major failure modes to be considered in mechanical design, and pulsed operation imposes stress with significant alternating components on the support structure (SS). Therefore, the reliability of the whole device is strongly affected by the stress and fatigue characteristic of the SS as the interface structure. This article introduces the SS design and details the fatigue life calculation methods based on the different characteristics of the sub-structures. The fatigue life in hazardous areas of the toroidal field coils anti-torque structure (TFCs-ATs) has been determined by non-linear analysis results. And with the stress-time history data of the vacuum vessel & poloidal field coils support structure (VV&PFCs SS), the fatigue analysis of the hot spots has been completed based on rain-flow counting method and linear cumulative damage method. The calculated minimum fatigue life on TFCs-ATs and VV&PFCs SS is 4.743E+05 and 1.805E+06 cycles, respectively. And the calculated fatigue life on sub-structures can meet the required life for HL-2M tokamak: 1.0E+05 cycles.

The re-design of the adoptable structure and the cooling manner of the divertor in the HL-2A tokamak is based on the parameters confirmed by the optimum divertor configuration and the primary modification scheme. The characteristics of the new divertor system include the double shear joint design on the domes and the outer target plates as well as the poloidal flow with toroidal manifolds. The results of the thermal and structural analysis of the outer target plates show that the design of the poloidal flow with toroidal manifolds can improve the capability of the target plates to withstand the heat loads, and the double shear joint design is compatible with the stress intensity requirements by the electromagnetic loads due to halo currents.

The preliminary design of a multi-barrels pellet injector with cycle refrigerator as an advanced plasma-fuelling tool for HL-2A tokamak has been proposed. The design aims at precise temperature control, easy operation with high reliability and high flexibility. GM-cycle refrigerator and pipe-gun structure have been employed to produce 25 pellets in 25 gun barrels simultaneously and the design aims. have been accomplished. Prime design principle, engineering parameters, structure and layout of the cryostat components as well as calculation of heat load for the cryostat are presented.

In the HL-2A 2004 experiment campaign, pulsed molecular beam injection (MBI) and strong hydrogen gas puffing under the divertor configuration were used for gas fueling. The experimental results show that the MBI of hydrogen can reduce the heat flux to the divertor target plate. The electron temperature measured by the Langmuir probe array decreases significantly during the injection of the molecular beam whereas the electron density increases. This indicates that the plasma pressure near the target plates tends to be constant at a new equilibrium level. In the divertor plasmas with strong hydrogen gas puffing a high plasma density up to 4.4 × 1019 m−3 was achieved. In addition, a phenomenon similar to the partially detached divertor regime was observed, which is being studied in open divertor tokamaks such as DIII-D to reduce the peak heat flux on the target plates near the separatrix. After a strong gas puffing the electron temperature measured on the outer divertor target plate near the separatrix decreases till below 5 eV or even lower, but that of the farther outer divertor target plate does not change obviously; and the CIII and the Hα emissions at the plasma edge decrease as expected, but the Hα emission near the X-point increases. These results reflects some interesting characteristics, which needs to be studied by further modeling and experiments.

The vacuum system for HL-2A was built in 2003. The test results indicated that this system is feasible. It consists of three main parts: A pumping system, a pumping divertor and a glow discharge cleaning (GDC) system. For the pumping system, there are three main functions: (1) evacuating the vacuum vessel thus to produce an ultra high vacuum, (2) removal of impurities released during baking and (3) pumping during GDC. The pumping divertor controls the particles at the plasma edge and the GDC system provides a clean wall conditioning. During the first campaign of physical trial experiment on HL-2A, the ultimate pressure reached 4.6 × 10-6 Pa, and the total leakage and outgassing rate in 12 hours was 1.8 × 10-5 Pam3/s, which is close to that of ASDEX.

A measuring system for high-speed hydrogen ice pellet was introduced in this paper and the photographing of flying pellet taken therein. With the system, a pellet (minimum size of Φ 0.3 mm) velocity (ranging from 50 m/s to 2500 m/s) can be measured in the HL-1M tokamak fueling experiments. By analyzing photographs and the conditions of frozen pellets (including gas supply, gas replenishment, temperature controlling etc), the pellet-freezing technology is summarized in the paper.