Impurities in a non-axisymmetric plasma. Transport and effect on bootstrap current
- Chalmers Univ. of Technology, Goteborg (Sweden); Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik, Greifswald (Germany)
- Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
- Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik, Greifswald (Germany)
- Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik, Greifswald (Germany); Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics, Stuttgart (Germany)
Impurities cause radiation losses and plasma dilution, and in stellarator plasmas the neoclassical ambipolar radial electric field is often unfavorable for avoiding strong impurity peaking. In this work we use a new continuum drift-kinetic solver, the SFINCS code (the Stellarator Fokker-Planck Iterative Neoclassical Conservative Solver) [M. Landreman et al., Phys. Plasmas 21 (2014) 042503] which employs the full linearized Fokker-Planck-Landau operator, to calculate neoclassical impurity transport coefficients for a Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) magnetic configuration. We compare SFINCS calculations with theoretical asymptotes in the high collisionality limit. We observe and explain a 1/nu-scaling of the inter-species radial transport coefficient at low collisionality, arising due to the field term in the inter-species collision operator, and which is not found with simplified collision models even when momentum correction is applied. However, this type of scaling disappears if a radial electric field is present. We use SFINCS to analyze how the impurity content affects the neoclassical impurity dynamics and the bootstrap current. We show that a change in plasma effective charge Zeff of order unity can affect the bootstrap current enough to cause a deviation in the divertor strike point locations.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Fusion Energy Sciences (FES)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- FG02-93ER54197; AC02-05CH11231; DEFC0208ER54964; DEFG0293ER54197
- OSTI ID:
- 1227103
- Alternate ID(s):
- OSTI ID: 1226677
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 22, Issue 11; ISSN 1070-664X
- Publisher:
- American Institute of Physics (AIP)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
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