Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userA unified model of density limit in fusion plasmas
236
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
A limit for the edge density, ruled by radiation losses from light impurities, is established by a minimal cylindrical magneto-thermal equilibrium model. For ohmic tokamak and reversed field pinch the limit scales linearly with the plasma current, as the empirical Greenwald limit. The auxiliary heating adds a further dependence, scaling with the 0.4 power, in agreement with L-mode tokamak experiments. For a purely externally heated configuration the limit takes on a Sudo-like form, depending mainly on the input power, and is compatible with recent Stellarator scalings.
rate research
Read More
To faithfully simulate ITER and other modern fusion devices, one must resolve electron and ion fluctuation scales in a five-dimensional phase space and time. Simultaneously, one must account for the interaction of this turbulence with the slow evolution of the large-scale plasma profiles. Because of the enormous range of scales involved and the high dimensionality of the problem, resolved first-principles global simulations are very challenging using conventional (brute force) techniques. In this thesis, the problem of resolving turbulence is addressed by developing velocity space resolution diagnostics and an adaptive collisionality that allow for the confident simulation of velocity space dynamics using the approximate minimal necessary dissipation. With regard to the wide range of scales, a new approach has been developed in which turbulence calculations from multiple gyrokinetic flux tube simulations are coupled together using transport equations to obtain self-consistent, steady-state background profiles and corresponding turbulent fluxes and heating. This approach is embodied in a new code, Trinity, which is capable of evolving equilibrium profiles for multiple species, including electromagnetic effects and realistic magnetic geometry, at a fraction of the cost of conventional global simulations. Furthermore, an advanced model physical collision operator for gyrokinetics has been derived and implemented, allowing for the study of collisional turbulent heating, which has not been extensively studied. To demonstrate the utility of the coupled flux tube approach, preliminary results from Trinity simulations of the core of an ITER plasma are presented.
A global heat flux model based on a fractional derivative of plasma pressure is proposed for the heat transport in fusion plasmas. The degree of the fractional derivative of the heat flux, $alpha$, is defined through the power balance analysis of the steady state. The model was used to obtain the experimental values of $alpha$ for a large database of the JET Carbon-wall as well as ITER Like-wall plasmas. The findings show that the average fractional degree of the heat flux over the database for electrons is $alpha sim 0.8$, suggesting a global scaling between the net heating and the pressure profile in the JET plasmas. The model is expected to provide an accurate and a simple description of heat transport that can be used in transport studies of fusion plasmas.
Magnetic confinement fusion reactors suffer severely from heat and particle losses through turbulent transport, which has inspired the construction of ever larger and more expensive reactors. Numerical simulations are vital to their design and operation, but particle collisions are too infrequent for fluid descriptions to be valid. Instead, strongly magnetised fusion plasmas are described by the gyrokinetic equations, a nonlinear integro-differential system for evolving the particle distribution functions in a five-dimensional position and velocity space, and the consequent electromagnetic field. Due to the high dimensionality, simulations of small reactor sections require hundreds of thousands of CPU hours on High Performance Computing platforms. We develop a Hankel-Hermite spectral representation for velocity space that exploits structural features of the gyrokinetic system. The representation exactly conserves discrete free energy in the absence of explicit dissipation, while our Hermite hypercollision operator captures Landau damping with few variables. Calculation of the electromagnetic fields becomes purely local, eliminating inter-processor communication in, and vastly accelerating, searches for linear instabilities. We implement these ideas in SpectroGK, an efficient parallel code. Turbulent fusion plasmas may dissipate free energy through linear phase mixing to fine scales in velocity space, as in Landau damping, or through a nonlinear cascade to fine scales in physical space, as in hydrodynamic turbulence. Using SpectroGK to study saturated electrostatic drift-kinetic turbulence, we find that the nonlinear cascade suppresses linear phase mixing at energetically-dominant scales, so the turbulence is fluid-like. We use this observation to derive Fourier-Hermite spectra for the electrostatic potential and distribution function, and confirm these spectra with simulations.
Scaling laws for ion temperature gradient driven turbulence in magnetized toroidal plasmas are derived and compared with direct numerical simulations. Predicted dependences of turbulence fluctuation amplitudes, spatial scales, and resulting heat fluxes on temperature gradient and magnetic field line pitch are found to agree with numerical results in both the driving and inertial ranges. Evidence is provided to support the critical balance conjecture that parallel streaming and nonlinear perpendicular decorrelation times are comparable at all spatial scales, leading to a scaling relationship between parallel and perpendicular spatial scales. This indicates that even strongly magnetized plasma turbulence is intrinsically three-dimensional.
Radio frequency (RF) waves can provide heating, current and flow drive, as well as instability control for steady state operations of fusion experiments. A particle simulation model has been developed in this work to provide a first-principles tool for studying the RF nonlinear interactions with plasmas. In this model, ions are considered as fully kinetic particles using the Vlasov equation and electrons are treated as guiding centers using the drift kinetic equation. This model has been implemented in a global gyrokinetic toroidal code (GTC) using real electron-to-ion mass ratio. To verify the model, linear simulations of ion plasma oscillation, ion Bernstein wave, and lower hybrid wave are carried out in cylindrical geometry and found to agree well with analytic predictions.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
