CORSICA: A comprehensive simulation of toroidal magnetic-fusion devices. Final report to the LDRD Program
In 1992, our group began exploring the requirements for a comprehensive simulation code for toroidal magnetic fusion experiments. There were several motivations for taking this step. First, the new machines being designed were much larger and more expensive than current experiments. Second, these new designs called for much more sophisticated control of the plasma shape and position, as well as the distributions of energy, mass, and current within the plasma. These factors alone made it clear that a comprehensive simulation capability would be an extremely valuable tool for machine design. The final motivating factor was that the national Numerical Tokamak Project (NTP) had recently received High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Grand Challenge funding to model turbulent transport in tokamaks, raising the possibility that first-principles simulations of this process might be practical in the near future. We felt that the best way to capitalize on this development was to integrate the resulting turbulence simulation codes into a comprehensive simulation. Such simulations must include the effects of many microscopic length- and time-scales. In order to do a comprehensive simulation efficiently, the length- and time- scale disparities must be exploited. We proposed to do this by coupling the average or quasistatic effects from the fast time-scales to a slow-time-scale transport code for the macroscopic plasma evolution. In FY93-FY96 we received funding to investigate algorithms for computationally coupling such disparate-scale simulations and to implement these algorithms in a prototype simulation code, dubbed CORSICA. Work on algorithms and test cases proceeded in parallel, with the algorithms being incorporated into CORSICA as they became mature. In this report we discuss the methods and algorithms, the CORSICA code, its applications, and our plans for the future.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 522508
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-ID-126284; ON: DE97053433
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 21 Mar 1997
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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