Evaluation of the neoclassical radial electric field in a collisional tokamak

Journal Article · Sat Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 2005 · Physics of Plasmas

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1819372· OSTI ID:20657967

Catto, Peter J; Simakov, Andrei N ^[1]

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1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Plasma Science and Fusion Center, 167 Albany Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)

The neoclassical electric field in a tokamak is determined by the conservation of toroidal angular momentum. In the steady state in the absence of momentum sources and sinks it is explicitly evaluated by the condition that radial flux of toroidal angular momentum vanishes. For a collisional or Pfirsch-Schlueter short mean-free path ordering with subsonic plasma flows we find that there are two limiting cases of interest. The first is the simpler case of a strongly up-down asymmetric tokamak for which the lowest order gyroviscosity does not vanish and must be balanced by the leading order collisional viscosity in order to determine the radial electric field. The second case is the more complicated case of an up-down symmetric tokamak for which the gyroviscosity must be evaluated to higher order and again balanced by the lowest order collisional viscosity to determine the radial electric field. In general, both the lowest and the next order contributions from the gyroviscosity must be retained.

• OSTI ID: 20657967
• Journal Information: Physics of Plasmas, Journal Name: Physics of Plasmas Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 12; ISSN PHPAEN; ISSN 1070-664X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
ANGULAR MOMENTUM
ELECTRIC FIELDS
PLASMA
SUBSONIC FLOW
TOKAMAK DEVICES