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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

Three dimensional simulations of plasma filaments in the scrape off layer: A comparison with models of reduced dimensionality

This paper presents simulations of isolated 3D filaments in a slab geometry obtained using a newly developed 3D reduced fluid code, written using the BOUT++ framework. First, systematic scans were performed to investigate how the dynamics of a filament are affected by its amplitude, perpendicular size, and parallel extent. The perpendicular size of the filament was found to have a strong influence on its motions, as it determined the relative importance of parallel currents to polarization and viscous currents, whilst drift-wave instabilities were observed if the initial amplitude of the blob was increased sufficiently. Next, the 3D simulations were compared to 2D simulations using different parallel closures; namely, the sheath dissipation closure, which neglects parallel gradients, and the vorticity advection closure, which neglects the influence of parallel currents. The vorticity advection closure was found to not replicate the 3D perpendicular dynamics and overestimated the initial radial acceleration of all the filaments studied. In contrast, a more satisfactory comparison with the sheath dissipation closure was obtained, even in the presence of significant parallel gradients, where the closure is no longer valid. Specifically, it captured the contrasting dynamics of filaments with different perpendicular sizes that were observed in the 3D simulations which the vorticity advection closure failed to replicate. However, neither closure successfully replicated the Boltzmann spinning effects nor the associated poloidal drift of the blob that was observed in the 3D simulations. Although the sheath dissipation closure was concluded to be more successful in replicating the 3D dynamics, it is emphasized that the vorticity advection closure may still be relevant for situations where the parallel current is inhibited from closing through the sheath due to effects such as strong magnetic shear around X points or increased resistivity near the targets.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Community Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation-3

The UCLA Plasma Simulation Group is a major partner of the “Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation”. This is the technical progress report for the UCLA effort. The UCLA effort is organized into HEP and ASCR activities.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2013

A domain decomposition method for pseudo-spectral electromagnetic simulations of plasmas

Pseudo-spectral electromagnetic solvers (i.e. representing the fields in Fourier space) have extraordinary precision. In particular, Haber et al. presented in 1973 a pseudo-spectral solver that integrates analytically the solution over a finite time step, under the usual assumption that the source is constant over that time step. Yet, pseudo-spectral solvers have not been widely used, due in part to the difficulty for efficient parallelization owing to global communications associated with global FFTs on the entire computational domains. A method for the parallelization of electromagnetic pseudo-spectral solvers is proposed and tested on single electromagnetic pulses, and on Particle-In-Cell simulations of the wakefield formation in a laser plasma accelerator. The method takes advantage of the properties of the Discrete Fourier Transform, the linearity of Maxwell’s equations and the finite speed of light for limiting the communications of data within guard regions between neighboring computational domains. Although this requires a small approximation, test results show that no significant error is made on the test cases that have been presented. The proposed method opens the way to solvers combining the favorable parallel scaling of standard finite-difference methods with the accuracy advantages of pseudo-spectral methods.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2025

A generative artificial intelligence framework for long-time plasma turbulence simulations

Generative deep learning techniques are employed in a novel framework for the construction of surrogate models capturing the spatiotemporal dynamics of 2D plasma turbulence. The proposed Generative Artificial Intelligence Turbulence (GAIT) framework enables the acceleration of turbulence simulations for long-time transport studies. GAIT leverages a convolutional variational auto-encoder and a recurrent neural network to generate new turbulence data from existing simulations, extending the time horizon of transport studies with minimal computational cost. The application of the GAIT framework to plasma turbulence using the Hasegawa–Wakatani (HW) model is presented, evaluating its performance via various analyses. Very good agreement is found between the GAIT and the HW models in the spatiotemporal Fourier and Proper Orthogonal Decomposition spectra, the flow topology characterized by the Okubo–Weiss parameter, and the time autocorrelation function of turbulent fluctuations. Excellent agreement has also been obtained in the probability distribution function of particle displacements and the effective turbulent diffusivity. In-depth analyses of the latent space of turbulent states, choice of hyperparameters and alternative deep learning models for the time prediction are presented. Our results highlight the potential of Artificial Intelligence-based surrogate models to overcome the computational challenges in turbulence simulation, which can be extended to other situations such as geophysical fluid dynamics.

Artificial intelligence↗
DOE OSTI2023

An extended Vlasov–Fokker–Planck approach for kinetic simulations of laser plasmas

Vlasov–Fokker–Planck simulation codes occupy an important niche in modeling laser-produced plasmas, since they are well suited to studying the effect of collisions on electron kinetic phenomena, especially energy transport. One of the most important elements of energy transport is the absorption of laser light by the plasma; however, simulating this in detail requires resolving oscillations of the laser light, whose characteristic timescale is orders of magnitude shorter than the simulation time needed to study transport physics. For this reason, most Vlasov–Fokker–Planck codes used to study electron transport in laser plasmas rely on simplified models of the laser–plasma coupling. Their underlying assumptions nominally preclude their use for modeling laser light having short-scale structure in space or time, such as broadband lasers. In this work, we derive a more general computational framework suitable for arbitrarily structured laser fields. Furthermore, our approach is based on an extended set of Vlasov–Fokker–Planck equations that separately solve for the low- and high-frequency plasma response. We implement these extended Vlasov–Fokker–Planck equations in the spherical harmonic code K2 and demonstrate the performance of the method on several laser absorption test problems, with particular attention to the judicious selection of time steps, time integrators, and spherical harmonic truncation, according to the intensity and spectrum of the laser light under consideration. Comparison with the widely used Langdon absorption operator shows the Langdon operator performs remarkably well for predicting laser heating in the simple cases considered here, even in situations that would seem to violate its underlying assumptions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Quantum signal processing for simulating cold plasma waves

Numerical modeling of radio-frequency waves in plasma with sufficiently high spatial and temporal resolution remains challenging even with modern computers. However, such simulations can be sped up using quantum computers in the future. In this work, we propose how to do such modeling for cold plasma waves, in particular, for an X wave propagating in an inhomogeneous one-dimensional plasma. The wave system is represented in the form of a vector Schrödinger equation with a Hermitian Hamiltonian. Block encoding is used to represent the Hamiltonian through unitary operations that can be implemented on a quantum computer. To perform the modeling, we apply the so-called quantum signal processing algorithm and construct the corresponding circuit. Quantum simulations with this circuit are emulated on a classical computer, and the results show agreement with traditional classical calculations. We also discuss how our quantum circuit scales with the resolution.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Importance of Resolving the Spectral Support of Beam-plasma Instabilities in Simulations

Many astrophysical plasmas are prone to beam-plasma instabilities. For relativistic and dilute beams, the spectral support of the beam-plasma instabilities is narrow, i.e., the linearly unstable modes that grow with rates comparable to the maximum growth rate occupy a narrow range of wavenumbers. This places stringent requirements on the box-sizes when simulating the evolution of the instabilities. We identify the implied lower limits on the box size imposed by the longitudinal beam plasma instability, i.e., typically the most stringent condition required to correctly capture the linear evolution of the instabilities in multidimensional simulations. We find that sizes many orders of magnitude larger than the resonant wavelength are typically required. Using one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, we show that the failure to sufficiently resolve the spectral support of the longitudinal instability yields slower growth and lower levels of saturation, potentially leading to erroneous physical conclusion.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2012

Final Technical Report for Center for Plasma Edge Simulation Research

The CPES research carried out by the Lehigh fusion group has sought to satisfy the evolving requirements of the CPES project. Overall, the Lehigh group has focused on verification and validation of the codes developed and/or integrated in the CPES project. Consequently, contacts and interaction with experimentalists have been maintained during the course of the project. Prof. Arnold Kritz, the leader of the Lehigh Fusion Group, has participated in the executive management of the CPES project. The code development and simulation studies carried out by the Lehigh fusion group are described in more detail in the sections below.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Extension of Landau-fluid closure to weakly collisional plasma regime

Both collisionless and collisional Landau fluid (LF) closure have been developed and implemented in two-fluid plasma simulation framework BOUT++, taking full advantage of the fast non-Fourier method (Dimits, 2014). The spectral range of good fit can be conveniently extended to larger domain by adding more Lorentzians. The scaling for upper limit of wavenumber resolved in collisionless LF operator and the fitting coefficients for the collisional LF operator, the later is extended to weakly collisional regime (ν$^{*}_{e}$ ~ 0.01), are presented in this paper. The flux limited expression q$^{FL}_{∥e}$ is reduced to free streaming expression q$^{FS}_{∥e}$ in collisionless limit and gives classical Spitzer–Härm result q$^{SH}_{∥e}$ in collisional limit as we expected. The collisional LF closure recovers the classical Spitzer–Härm result q$^{SH}_{∥e}$ in collisional limit and is same as the collisionless LF closure in collisionless limit. The test cases also obviously reflect the nonlocal effects from LF closures and responding to different boundary conditions in open surface region. Our report will make it more applicable and possible to include the Landau damping kinetic effect in the fluid simulation of tokamak plasma.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2012

SciDAC - Center for Simulation of Wave Interactions with MHD -- General Atomics Support of ORNL Collaboration

The Center for Simulation of Wave Interactions with Magnetohydrodynamics (SWIM) project is dedicated to conduct research on integrated multi-physics simulations. The Integrated Plasma Simulator (IPS) is a framework that was created by the SWIM team. It provides an integration infrastructure for loosely coupled component-based simulations by facilitating services for code execution coordination, computational resource management, data management, and inter-component communication. The IPS framework features improving resource utilization, implementing application-level fault tolerance, and support of the concurrent multi-tasking execution model. The General Atomics (GA) team worked closely with other team members on this contract, and conducted research in the areas of computational code monitoring, meta-data management, interactive visualization, and user interfaces. The original website to monitor SWIM activity was developed in the beginning of the project. Due to the amended requirements, the software was redesigned and a revision of the website was deployed into production in April of 2010. Throughout the duration of this project, the SWIM Monitoring Portal (http://swim.gat.com:8080/) has been a critical production tool for supporting the project's physics goals.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2013

SciDAC Center for Plasma Edge Simulation

This project with a total funding of $592,998 for six years has partially supported four postdoctoral researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). The UCI team has formulated electrostatic and electromagnetic global gyrokinetic particle simulation models with kinetic electrons, implemented these models in the edge code XGC1, performed benchmark between GTC and XGC1, developed computational tools for gyrokinetic particle simulation in tokamak edge geometry, and initiated preparatory study of edge turbulence using GTC code. The research results has been published in 12 papers and presented at many international and national conferences.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2014

Full kinetic simulations of plasma flow interactions with meso- and microscale magnetic dipoles

We examined the plasma flow response to meso- and microscale magnetic dipoles by performing three-dimensional full particle-in-cell simulations. We particularly focused on the formation of a magnetosphere and its dependence on the intensity of the magnetic moment. The size of a magnetic dipole immersed in a plasma flow can be characterized by a distance L from the dipole center to the position where the pressure of the local magnetic field becomes equal to the dynamic pressure of the plasma flow under the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) approximation. In this study, we are interested in a magnetic dipole whose L is smaller than the Larmor radius of ions r{sub iL} calculated with the unperturbed dipole field at the distance L from the center. In the simulation results, we confirmed the clear formation of a magnetosphere consisting of a magnetopause and a tail region in the density profile, although the spatial scale is much smaller than the MHD scale. One of the important findings in this study is that the spatial profiles of the plasma density as well as the current flows are remarkably affected by the finite Larmor radius effect of the plasma flow, which is different from the Earth's magnetosphere. The magnetopause found in the upstream region is located at a position much closer to the dipole center than L. In the equatorial plane, we also found an asymmetric density profile with respect to the plasma flow direction, which is caused by plasma gyration in the dipole field region. The ion current layers are created in the inner region of the dipole field, and the electron current also flows in the region beyond the ion current layer because ions with a large inertia can closely approach the dipole center. Unlike the ring current structure of the Earth's magnetosphere, the current layers in the microscale dipole fields are not circularly closed around the dipole center. Since the major current is caused by the particle gyrations, the current is independently determined to be in the direction of the electron and ion gyrations, which are the same in both the upstream and downstream regions. The present analysis on the formation of a magnetosphere in the regime of a microscale magnetic dipole is significant for understanding the solar wind response to the crustal magnetic anomalies on the Moon surface, such as were recently observed by spacecraft.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Simulation of Plasma Emission in Magnetized Plasmas

The recent Parker Solar Probe observations of type III radio bursts show that the effects of the finite background magnetic field can be an important factor in the interpretation of data. In the present paper, the effects of the background magnetic field on the plasma-emission process, which is believed to be the main emission mechanism for solar coronal and interplanetary type III radio bursts, are investigated by means of the particle-in-cell simulation method. The effects of the ambient magnetic field are systematically surveyed by varying the ratio of plasma frequency to electron gyrofrequency. The present study shows that for a sufficiently strong ambient magnetic field, the wave–particle interaction processes lead to a highly field-aligned longitudinal mode excitation and anisotropic electron velocity distribution function, accompanied by a significantly enhanced plasma emission at the second-harmonic plasma frequency. For such a case, the polarization of the harmonic emission is almost entirely in the sense of extraordinary mode. On the other hand, for moderate strengths of the ambient magnetic field, the interpretation of the simulation result is less clear. The underlying nonlinear-mode coupling processes indicate that to properly understand and interpret the simulation results requires sophisticated analyses involving interactions among magnetized plasma normal modes, including the two transverse modes of the magneto-active plasma, namely, the extraordinary and ordinary modes, as well as electron-cyclotron-whistler, plasma oscillation, and upper-hybrid modes. At present, a nonlinear theory suitable for quantitatively analyzing such complex-mode coupling processes in magnetized plasmas is incomplete, which calls for further theoretical research, but the present simulation results could provide a guide for future theoretical efforts.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Synthetic diagnostics platform for fusion plasmas (invited)

A Synthetic Diagnostics Platform (SDP) for fusion plasmas has been developed which provides state of the art synthetic reflectometry, beam emission spectroscopy, and Electron Cyclotron Emission (ECE) diagnostics. Interfaces to the plasma simulation codes GTC, XGC-1, GTS, and M3D-C{sup 1} are provided, enabling detailed validation of these codes. In this paper, we give an overview of SDP’s capabilities, and introduce the synthetic diagnostic modules. A recently developed synthetic ECE Imaging module which self-consistently includes refraction, diffraction, emission, and absorption effects is discussed in detail. Its capabilities are demonstrated on two model plasmas. The importance of synthetic diagnostics in validation is shown by applying the SDP to M3D-C{sup 1} output and comparing it with measurements from an edge harmonic oscillation mode on DIII-D.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2023

lasy v0.1

Lasy is a Python library that facilitates numerical simulations of the interaction of complex laser pulses with plasmas. More specifically, lasy offers many ways to define complex laser pulses (e.g. from commonly-known analytical formulas, from experimental measurements, etc.) and then computes and saves the corresponding laser field in a standardized file. This file can then be read by external plasma simulation codes, that will then simulate the interaction between the complex laser pulse and a plasma. Lasy is useful for instance for numerical simulations of plasma-based particle accelerators, plasma-based laser amplification, etc. Lasy avoids having to duplicate the code that defines complex laser pulses in each plasma simulation codes, and instead provides a trusted, centralized implementation.

Lehe, Remi↗