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Guo, Zehua

Publications and source records attributed to Guo, Zehua.

At least 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Tokamak disruption simulation

UT contribution in this Tokamak Disruption Simulation (TDS) is to develop a parallel high‐order hybridized Discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) methods for large‐s cale MHD simulations. The following are the major goals: 1) Construction of HDG methods for linearized MHD, 2) Rigorous analysis for the HDG formulations for linearized MHD, 3) 2D and 3D simulations to verify the convergent of the HDG methods for linearized MHD, 4) multigrid solvers/preconditioners for HDG formulations, 5) HDG for reconnection problems, 6) Divergence cleaning with HDG, 7) HDG formulations for nonlinear MHD, 8) Picard fixed point HDG approach, 9) IMEX HDG‐DG for nonlinear HDG; 10) parallel large‐scale HDG for linear and nonlinear MHD simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Effect of ATF Cr-coated-Zircaloy on BWR In-vessel Accident Progression during a Station Blackout

The deposition of protective coatings on nuclear fuel cladding has been considered as a near-term Accident Tolerant Fuel (ATF) concept that will reduce the high-temperature oxidation rate and enhance accident tolerance of the cladding while providing additional benefits during normal and transient. In this study, the performance of the proposed ATF concept of Cr-coated-Zircaloy is assessed using a generic Boiling Water Reactor MELCOR plant model considering a Short-term Station Blackout (STSBO) scenario. Simulation results indicate that the use of Cr-coated-Zircaloy as cladding and canister material mitigates the core degradation process as compared to the traditional Zircaloy cladding and canister design. The onset of fuel degradation and collapse is delayed by over thirty minutes, and the extent of fuel degradation is reduced. Specifically, the gross in-vessel hydrogen generation decreased by almost a factor of three. Although the eutectic reaction between Cr-coating and Zircaloy could cause an early failure of the coating, the improvement in the delay of fuel degradation is still notable. In addition, a thicker coating is found helpful to obtain additional coping time and to decrease hydrogen generation. In addition to the eutectic formation that may compromise Cr-coated Zr, a different failure mode is identified for the Cr-coated-Zr when compared to Zircaloy; i.e., a complete melt of base material leads to component collapse before the coating is oxidized and consumed. These findings can help the industry focus on productive areas of research and development for accident-tolerant fuel concepts and enhancement of core safety margins.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2019

Toroidal effect on runaway vortex and avalanche growth rate

The momentum-space dynamics of runaway electrons in a slab geometry, in terms of both the geometry and topological transition of the runaway vortex when synchrotron radiative damping is taking into account, have recently been shown to play a crucial role in runaway mitigation and avoidance. In a tokamak geometry, magnetic trapping arises from parallel motion along the magnetic field that scales as 1/R in strength with R the major radius. Since the transit time for a runaway electron moving along the field is of order 10 -8 sec while the collisional time is of ~ 0.01 sec in ITER-like plasmas, a bounce-averaged formulation can drastically reduce computational cost. Here the LAPS-RFP code’s implementation of a bounce-averaged relativistic Fokker- Planck model, along with the essential physics of synchrotron radiation damping and knock-on collisions, is described. It is found that the magnetic trapping can reduce the volume of the runaway vortex as the momentum-space fluxes are strongly modified inside the trapped-region. As a result, the avalanche growth rate is reduced at off-axis locations. In addition to benchmarking with previous calculations that did not take into account radiation damping, we also clarify how synchrotron radiation damping modifies the avalanche growth rate in a tokamak.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Avalanche mechanism for runaway electron amplification in a tokamak plasma

The avalanche of runaway electrons is thought to pose a significant obstacle to the success of reactor scale devices such as ITER. As a result, a significant effort has been devoted toward quantifying both the threshold for the initiation of the avalanche of runaway electrons and the efficiency of the avalanche mechanism. In this work, these two quantities are computed utilizing a guiding-center formulation with large-angle collision operators of varying physics fidelity. The use of a guiding-center formulation, while computationally more costly compared to bounce-averaged approaches, provides a conceptually straightforward means of incorporating tokamak geometry. It is found that while the avalanche threshold is only weakly impacted by toroidal geometry for fully ionized low- Z plasmas, it can be significantly impacted if high- Z impurities are present. Furthermore, it is shown that the efficiency of the avalanche mechanism depends sensitively on the impurity content, the charge state of the underlying impurities, and the radial profile of the seed electron population. Lastly, the commonly employed Møller secondary source term used to model the generation of secondary electrons is shown to yield avalanche growth rates and thresholds in good agreement with a more complete conservative large-angle collision operator.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Diffusive tunneling in an isobaric but non-isothermal fuel-pusher mixture

The hydrodynamic mix of fusion fuel and inert pusher can simultaneously generate smaller fuel pockets and finer pusher layers that separate them. Smaller fuel pockets have greater local Knudsen numbers, which tend to exacerbate the Knudsen layer reactivity reduction. A thinner pusher layer separating the neighboring fuel pockets, on the other hand, can enable the diffusive tunneling of Gamow fuel ions through the pusher layer and hence alleviate the Knudsen layer reactivity degradation. Here in this paper, the diffusive tunneling phenomenon describes a random walk process by which the Gamow fuel ions from one fuel pocket can traverse the inert pusher layer to join a neighboring fuel pocket without losing much of their energy. This is made possible by the much slower collisional slowing down rate compared with the pitch angle scattering rate of light fuel ions with heavier pusher ions. In an isobaric target mixture where fuel and pusher segments can have distinct temperatures, due to their different compressibilities, the temperature effect on the critical pusher layer areal density below which diffusive tunneling can occur, which is a property of the hydrodynamic mix, is understood by computing the ion charge state distribution using a collisional radiative model. This information is fed into the collisionality evaluation, enabling a parametric scan of the diffusive tunneling physics in terms of the target pressure, fuel, and pusher temperatures. It is found that when the gold pusher layer has a temperature above 1 keV, the variation of the pusher temperature has little effect on the critical areal mass density below which diffusive tunneling can occur. If the pusher layer is 1 keV or below, the critical areal mass density rises sharply, indicating that for a stronger fuel-pusher temperature disparity, the onset of diffusive tunneling will be at an earlier stage of the hydrodynamic mix when the fuel-pusher mixing structures are of less reduced size.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Spatial Transport of Runaway Electrons in Axisymmetric Tokamak Plasmas

An implicit assumption made in the vast majority of studies of runaway electrons is that they are well confined to a given magnetic flux surface, thus allowing the use of slab or bounce averaged formulations that ignore the spatial transport of runaway electrons. While such an assumption is known to break down in the presence of strong 3D magnetic field perturbations, we show that it can be violated even for an axisymmetric magnetic field under conditions representative of an actively mitigated disrupting plasma. Specifically, the low temperature and large impurity content typical of a post thermal quench plasma are shown to provide a drastic enhancement of the diffusive and convective transport of runaways electrons, where the convective component is found to be dominated by the Ware pinch. This inward convective flux allows runaway electrons to be displaced toward the plasma center, where they are eventually detrapped and reaccelerated, thus focusing populations of runaway electrons in the inner portion of the plasma. The resulting runaway electron distribution is shown to settle into a well-defined spatial eigenmode, whose form is often insensitive to the spatial distribution of the original seed population. The underlying transport processes responsible for determining the width and shape of the spatial runaway electron eigenmode are analyzed under a range of circumstances characteristic of a post thermal quench plasma.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Yield reduction via the Knudsen layer effect in a mixture of fuel and pusher material

Hydrodynamic mix in inertial confinement fusion capsules produces chunk mix between deuterium-tritium fuel and inert pusher materials. The characteristic size of the intermingled fuel and pusher materials can be rapidly reduced by fluid mix, especially when the streamlines of the flow field are chaotic. This leads to an increasing Knudsen number for the fuel segments and a decreasing size of the pusher remnant with respect to the fuel ion mean-free-path. Finally, the former exacerbates Knudsen layer yield degradation due to fast ion losses, while the latter tends to alleviate Knudsen layer yield reduction due to other kinetic effects such as diffusive tunneling.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Control of runaway electron energy using externally injected whistler waves

One way of mitigating runaway damage of the plasma-facing components in a tokamak fusion reactor is by limiting the runaway electron energy under a few MeV, while not necessarily reducing the runaway current appreciably. Here in this paper, we describe a physics mechanism by which such momentum space engineering of the runaway distribution can be facilitated by externally injected high-frequency electromagnetic waves such as whistler waves. The drastic impact that wave-induced scattering can have on the runaway energy distribution is fundamentally the result of its ability to control the runaway vortex in the momentum space. The runaway vortex, which is a local circulation of runaways in momentum space, is the outcome of the competition between Coulomb collisions, synchrotron radiation damping, and runaway acceleration by the parallel electric field. By introducing a wave that resonantly interacts with runaways in a particular range of energies which is mildly relativistic, the enhanced scattering would reshape the vortex by cutting off the part that is highly relativistic. The efficiency of resonant scattering accentuates the requirement that the wave amplitude can be small so the power requirement from external wave injection is practical for the mitigation scheme.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Relation of the runaway avalanche threshold to momentum space topology

Here, the underlying physics responsible for the formation of an avalanche instability due to the generation of secondary electrons is studied. A careful examination of the momentum space topology of the runaway electron population is carried out with an eye toward identifying how qualitative changes in the momentum space of the runaway electrons is correlated with the avalanche threshold. It is found that the avalanche threshold is tied to the merger of an O and X point in the momentum space of the primary runaway electron population. Such a change of the momentum space topology is shown to be accurately described by a simple analytic model, thus providing a powerful means of determining the avalanche threshold for a range of model assumptions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Fast ion transport at a gas-metal interface

Fast ion transport and the resulting fusion yield reduction are computed at a gas-metal interface. The extent of fusion yield reduction is observed to depend sensitively on the charge state of the surrounding pusher material and the width of the atomically mixed region. These sensitivities suggest that idealized boundary conditions often implemented at the gas-pusher interface for the purpose of estimating fast ion loss will likely overestimate fusion reactivity reduction in several important limits. Additionally, the impact of a spatially complex material interface is investigated by considering a collection of droplets of the pusher material immersed in a DT plasma. It is found that for small Knudsen numbers, the extent of fusion yield reduction scales with the surface area of the material interface. As the Knudsen number is increased, but, the simple surface area scaling is broken, suggesting that hydrodynamic mix has a nontrivial impact on the extent of fast ion losses.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Models of primary runaway electron distribution in the runaway vortex regime

Generation of runaway electrons (RE) beams can possibly induce the most deleterious effect of tokamak disruptions. A number of recent numerical calculations have confirmed the formation of a RE bump in their energy distribution by taking into account Synchrontron radiational damping force due to RE’s gyromotions. Here, we present a detailed examination on how the bump location changes at different pitch-angle and the characteristics of the RE pitch-angle distribution. Although REs moving along the magnetic field are preferably accelerated and then populate the phase-space of larger pitch-angle mainly through diffusions, an off-axis peak can still form due to the presence of the vortex structure which causes accumulation of REs at low pitch-angle. A simplified Fokker- Planck model and its semi-analytical solutions based on local expansions around the O point is used to illustrate the characteristics of RE distribution around the O point of the runaway vortex in phase-space. The calculated energy location of the O point together with the local energy and pitch-angle distributions agree with the full numerical solution.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Turbulent current drive mechanisms

Mechanisms through which plasma microturbulence can drive a mean electron plasma current are derived. The efficiency through which these turbulent contributions can drive deviations from neoclassical predictions of the electron current profile is computed by employing a linearized Coulomb collision operator. It is found that a non-diffusive contribution to the electron momentum flux as well as an anomalous electron-ion momentum exchange term provide the most efficient means through which turbulence can modify the mean electron current for the cases considered. Such turbulent contributions appear as an effective EMF within Ohm’s law, and hence provide an ideal means for driving deviations from neoclassical predictions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Phase-space dynamics of runaway electrons in magnetic fields

Dynamics of runaway electrons in magnetic fields are governed by the competition of three dominant physics: parallel electric field acceleration, Coulomb collision, and synchrotron radiation. Examination of the energy and pitch-angle flows reveals that the presence of local vortex structure and global circulation is crucial to the saturation of primary runaway electrons. Models for the vortex structure, which has an O-point to X-point connection, and the bump of runaway electron distribution in energy space have been developed and compared against the simulation data. Lastly, identification of these velocity-space structures opens a new venue to re-examine the conventional understanding of runaway electron dynamics in magnetic fields.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Critical role of electron heat flux on Bohm criterion

Bohm criterion, originally derived for an isothermal-electron and cold-ion plasma, is often used as a rule of thumb for more general plasmas. Here, we establish a more precise determination of the Bohm criterion that are quantitatively useful for understanding and modeling collisional plasmas that still have collisional mean-free-path much greater than plasma Debye length. Specifically, it is shown that electron heat flux, rather than the isothermal electron assumption, is what sets the Bohm speed to be $\sqrt{k_B(T_e||+3T_i||)/m_i}$ with T e,i∥ the electron and ion parallel temperature at the sheath entrance and m i the ion mass.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Plasma power recycling at the divertor surface

With a divertor made of solid materials like carbon and tungsten, plasma ions are expected to be recycled at the divertor surface with a time-averaged particle recycling coefficient very close to unity in steady-state operation. This means that almost every plasma ion (hydrogen and helium) will be returned to the plasma, mostly as neutrals. The power flux deposited by the plasma on the divertor surface, on the other hand, can have varying recycling characteristics depending on the material choice of the divertor; the run-time atomic composition of the surface, which can be modified by material mix due to impurity migration in the chamber; and the surface morphology change over time. In general, a high-Z–material (such as tungsten) surface tends to reflect light ions and produce stronger power recycling, while a low-Z–material (such as carbon) surface tends to have a larger sticking coefficient for light ions and hence lower power recycling. Here, an explicit constraint on target plasma density and temperature is derived from the truncated bi-Maxwellian sheath model, in relation to the absorbed power load and power recycling coefficient at the divertor surface. Lastly, it is shown that because of the surface recombination energy flux, the attached plasma has a sharper response to power recycling in comparison to a detached plasma.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Kinetic model for the collisionless sheath of a collisional plasma

Collisional plasmas typically have mean-free-path still much greater than the Debye length, so the sheath is mostly collisionless. Once the plasma density, temperature, and flow are specified at the sheath entrance, the profile variation of electron and ion density, temperature, flow speed, and conductive heat fluxes inside the sheath is set by collisionless dynamics, and can be predicted by an analytical kinetic model distribution. These predictions are contrasted here with direct kinetic simulations, showing good agreement.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗