Impurity production monitoring during RF experiments in Tore Supra

Real time monitoring of edge plasma impurity content is used in a radiofrequency heated plasma scenario, to operate the tokamak safely by preventing any large increase in the impurity source, and to asses the global machine conditions after wall conditioning procedures. By means of high resolution Vacuum Ultraviolet spectroscopy, the main intrinsic impurity line brightnesses (C IV, O IV, Fe XV and Cu XIX) are routinely monitored and stored in a database along with basic plasma parameters (plasma current, electron density, injected power). The radiated power and the effective charge are also included for data consistency analysis. This paper describes the impurity monitoring technique implemented on Tore Supra (TS) and presents the main results concerning the evolution of the plasma edge impurity content for two scenarios performed on TS: high power scenario and long pulse duration scenario.