Stepped pressure equilibrium with relaxed flow and applications in reversed-field pinch plasmas

Qu, Zhisong; Dewar, Robert L.; Ebrahimi, Fatima; Anderson, Jay K.; Hudson, Stuart R.; Hole, Matthew J.

doi:10.1088/1361-6587/ab7fc5

Stepped pressure equilibrium with relaxed flow and applications in reversed-field pinch plasmas

Journal Article · Mon Apr 13 00:00:00 EDT 2020 · Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6587/ab7fc5· OSTI ID:1606326

^[1]; Dewar, Robert L. ^[1]; Ebrahimi, Fatima ^[2]; Anderson, Jay K. ^[3]; ^[2]; ^[4]

Australian National Univ., Canberra (Australia)
Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)
Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
Australian National Univ., Canberra (Australia); Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Kirrawee (Australia)

The multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamics (MRxMHD) has been successful in the construction of equilibria in three-dimensional (3D) configurations. In MRxMHD, the plasma is sliced into sub-volumes separated by ideal interfaces, each undergoing relaxation, allowing the formation of islands and chaos. The resulting equilibrium has a stepped pressure profile across sub-volumes. The stepped pressure equilibrium code (SPEC) was developed to calculate MRxMHD equilibria numerically. In this work, we have extended the SPEC code to compute MRxMHD equilibria with field-aligned flow and rotation, following the theoretical development to incorporate cross-helicity and angular momentum constraints. The code has been verified for convergence and compared to a Grad–Shafranov solver in 2D. We apply our new tool to study the flow profile change before and after the sawtooth crash of a reversed-field pinch discharge, in which data of the parallel flow is available. We find the promising result that under the constraints of cross-helicity and angular momentum, the parallel flow profile in post-crash SPEC equilibrium is flat in the plasma core and the amplitude of the flow matches experimental observations. Lastly, we provide an example equilibrium with a 3D helical field structure as the favored lower energy state. This will be the first 3D numerical equilibrium in which the flow effects are self-consistently calculated.

View Accepted Manuscript (DOE)

Research Organization:: Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Princeton, NJ (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE

Contributing Organization:: ARC projects DP140100790 and DP170102606, and Simons Foundation/SFARI (560651, AB).

Grant/Contract Number:: AC02-09CH11466

OSTI ID:: 1606326

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 23028740

Journal Information:: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Journal Name: Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 62; ISSN 0741-3335

Publisher:: IOP ScienceCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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