Partnership for Edge Physics Simulation

Abstract

A major goal of our participation in the Edge Physics Simulation project has been to contribute to the understanding of the self-organization of tokamak turbulence fluctuations resulting in the formation of a staircase structure in the ion temperature. A second important goal is to demonstrate how small scale turbulence in plasmas self-organizes with dynamically driven quasi-stationary flow shear. These goals have been accomplished through the analyses of the statistical properties of XGC1 flux driven Gyrokinetic electrostatic ion temperature gradient (ITG) turbulence simulation data in which neutrals are included. The ITG turbulence data, and in particular fluctuation data, were obtained from a massively parallel flux-driven gyrokinetic full-f particle-in-cell simulation of a DIII-D like equilibrium. Below some the findings are summarized. It was observed that the emergence of staircase structure is related to the variations in the normalized temperature gradient length (R/LT) and the poloidal flow shear. Average turbulence intensity is found to be large in the vicinity of minima in R/LTi, where ITG growth is expected to be lower. The distributions of the occurrences of potential fluctuation are found to be Gaussian away from the staircase-step locations, but they are found to be non-Gaussian in the vicinity of staircase-step locations. The results of analytically derived expressions for the distribution of the occurrences of turbulence intensity and intensity flux were compared with the corresponding quantities computed using XGC1 simulation data and good agreement is found. The derived expressions predicts inward and outward propagation of turbulence intensity flux in an intermittent fashion. The outward propagation of turbulence intensity flux occurs at staircase-step locations and is related to the change in poloidal flow velocity shear and to the change in the ion temperature gradient. The standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis for turbulence quantities were computed and found to be large in the vicinity of the staircase-step structures. Large values of skewness and kurtosis can be explained by a temporary opening and closing of the structure which allows turbulence intensity events to propagate. The staircase patterns may reduce the ion heat transport and a manipulation of these patterns may be used to optimize heat transport in tokamaks. An additional objective of the research in support of the Edge Physics Simulation initiative has been to improve the understanding of scrape-off layer thermal transport. In planning experiments and designing future tokamaks, it is important to understand the physical effects that contribute to divertor heat-load fluxes. The research accomplished will contribute to developing new models for the scrape-off layer region. The XGC0 code was used to compute the heat fluxes and the heat-load width in the outer divertor plates of C-Mod and DIII-D tokamaks. It was observed that the width of the XGC0 neoclassical heat-load was approximately inversely proportional to the total plasma current. Anomalous transport in the H-mode pedestal region of five Alcator C-Mod discharges, representing a collisionality scan, was analyzed. The understanding of anomalous transport in the pedestal region is important for the development of a comprehensive model for the H-mode pedestal slope. It was found that the electron thermal anomalous diffusivities at the pedestal top increase with the electron collisionality. This dependence can point to the DRIBM as the modes that drive the anomalous transport in the plasma edge of highly collisional discharges. The effects of plasma shaping on the H-mode pedestal structure was also investigated. The differences in the predicted H-mode pedestal width and height for the DIII-D discharges with different elongation and triangularities were discussed. For the discharges with higher elongation, it was found that the gradients of the plasma profiles in the H-mode pedestal reach semi-steady states. In these simulations, the pedestal slowly continued to evolve to higher pedestal pressures and bootstrap currents until the peeling ballooning stability conditions were satisfied. The discharges with lower elongation do not reach the semi-steady state, and ELM crashes were triggered at earlier times. The plasma elongation was found to have a stronger stabilizing effect than the plasma triangularity. For the discharges with lower elongation and lower triangularity, the ELM frequency was large, and the H-mode pedestal evolves rapidly. It was found that the temperature of neutrals in the scrape-off-layer region can affect the dynamics of the H-mode pedestal buildup. However, the final pedestal profiles were nearly independent of the neutral temperature. The elongation and triangularity affected the pedestal widths of plasma density and electron temperature profiles differently. This study illustrated a new mechanism for controlling the pedestal bootstrap current and the pedestal stability.