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Kohno, Haruhiko

Publications and source records attributed to Kohno, Haruhiko.

Validity condition for the local sheath impedance boundary condition and a nonlocal generalization

ICRF sheaths can cause unwanted interactions of high-power RF waves with material surfaces in magnetic fusion devices. In previous work, a local RF sheath impedance boundary condition (BC) was derived for use in ICRF codes together with a microscale (i.e., Debye or sheath width scale) model for obtaining the sheath impedance used in that BC. This local RF sheath BC matches the normal component of current and electrostatic potential across the sheath-plasma interface. Collapsing the matching conditions at the sheath-plasma interface to a BC depends on the assumption of scale separation, which can be violated when conditions along the local radius of curvature of the surface vary sufficiently rapidly. The validity condition is explored in this contribution, with special attention to the case where the magnetic field approaches being tangent to the surface. When the local sheath BC no longer applies, a non-local sheath BC is developed under the assumption of a more relaxed scale separation assumption. It is shown that the non-local sheath BC reduces to the previous local sheath BC under appropriate conditions. Furthermore, a surface-integrated sheath admittance parameter describes the 2D physics in the new BC.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A post-processing method to simulate the generalized RF sheath boundary condition

For applications of ICRF power in fusion devices, control of RF sheath interactions is of great importance. A sheath boundary condition (SBC) was previously developed to provide an effective surface impedance for the interaction of the RF sheath with the waves. The SBC enables the surface power flux and rectified potential energy available for sputtering to be calculated. For legacy codes which cannot easily implement the SBC, or to speed convergence in codes which do implement it, we consider here an approximate method to simulate SBCs by post-processing results obtained using other, e.g. conducting wall, boundary conditions. The basic approximation is that the modifications resulting from the generalized SBC are driven by a fixed incoming wave which could be either a fast wave or a slow wave. Finally, the method is illustrated in slab geometry and compared with exact numerical solutions; it is shown to work very well.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗