Fast Low-to-High Confinement Mode Bifurcation Dynamics in a Tokamak Edge Plasma Gyrokinetic Simulation.
Transport barrier formation and its relation to sheared flows in fluids and plasmas are of fundamental interest in various natural and laboratory observations and of critical importance in achieving an economical energy production in a magnetic fusion device. Here we report the first observation of an edge transport barrier formation event in an electrostatic gyrokinetic simulation carried out in a realistic diverted tokamak edge geometry under strong forcing by a high rate of heat deposition. The results show that turbulent Reynolds-stress-driven sheared E×B flows act in concert with neoclassical orbit loss to quench turbulent transport and form a transport barrier just inside the last closed magnetic flux surface.
Fully Kinetic Simulation of Ion-Temperature-Gradient Instabilities in Tokamaks
The feasibility of using full ion kinetics, instead of gyrokinetics, in simulating low-frequency Ion-Temperature-Gradient (ITG) instabilities in tokamaks has recently been demonstrated. The present work extends the full ion kinetics to the nonlinear regime and investigates the nonlinear saturation of a single-n ITG instability due to the E × B trapping mechanism (n is the toroidal mode number). The saturation amplitude predicted by the E × B trapping theory is found to agree with the saturation level observed in the simulation. In extending to the nonlinear regime, we developed a toroidal Boris full orbit integrator, which proved to be accurate in capturing both the short-time scale cyclotron motion and long time scale drift motion, with good kinetic energy conservation and toroidal angular momentum conservation in tokamak equilibrium magnetic fields. This work also extends the previous work from analytic circular magnetic equilibria to general numerical magnetic equilibria, enabling simulation of realistic equilibria reconstructed from tokamak experiments.
Global two-fluid turbulence simulations of L-H transitions and edge localized mode dynamics in the COMPASS-D tokamak
It is shown that the transition from L-mode to H-mode regimes in tokamaks can be reproduced using a two-fluid, fully electromagnetic, plasma model when a suitable particle sink is added at the edge. Such a model is implemented in the CUTIE code [A. Thyagaraja et al., Eur. J. Mech. B/Fluids 23, 475 (2004)] and is illustrated on plasma parameters that mimic those in the COMPASS-D tokamak with electron cyclotron resonance heating [Fielding et al., Plasma Phys. Contr. Fusion 42, A191 (2000)]. In particular, it is shown that holding the heating power, current, and magnetic field constant and increasing the fuelling rate to raise the plasma density leads spontaneously to the formation of an edge transport barrier (ETB) which occurs going from low to higher density experimentally. In the following quiescent period in which the stored energy of the plasma rises linearly with time, a dynamical transition occurs in the simulation with the appearance of features resembling strong edge localized modes. The simulation...