A test particle model for Monte Carlo simulation of plasma transport driven by quasineutrality.

摘要

This paper is concerned with the problem of transport in controlled nuclear fusion as it applies to confinement in a tokamak or stellarator. We perform numerical experiments to validate a mathematical model of P. R. Garabedian in which the electric potential is determined by quasineutrality because of singular perturbation of the Poisson equation. The simulations are made using a transport code written by O. Betancourt and M. Taylor, with changes to incorporate our case studies. We adopt a test particle model naturally suggested by the problem of tracking particles in plasma physics. The statistics due to collisions are modeled by a drift kinetic equation whose numerical solution is based on the Monte Carlo method of A. Boozer and G. Kuo-Petravic. The collision operator drives the distribution function in velocity space towards the normal distribution, or Maxwellian. It is shown that details of the collision operator other than its dependence on the collision frequency and temperature matter little for transport, and the role of conservation of momentum is investigated. Exponential decay makes it possible to find the confinement times of both ions and electrons by high performance computing. Three-dimensional perturbations in the electromagnetic field model the anomalous transport of electrons and simulate the turbulent behavior that is presumably triggered by the displacement current. We make a convergence study of the method, derive scaling laws that are in good agreement with predictions from experimental data, and present a comparison with the JET experiment.