Kinetic modeling of divertor heat load fluxes in the Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D tokamaks
- Tech-X Corporation, Boulder, Colorado 80303 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015 (United States)
- National Fusion Research Institute, Daejeon, 305-333 (Korea, Republic of)
- Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 (United States)
- MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)
- General Atomics, San Diego, California 92121 (United States)
The guiding-center kinetic neoclassical transport code, XGC0 [Chang et al., Phys. Plasmas 11, 2649 (2004)], is used to compute the heat fluxes and the heat-load width in the outer divertor plates of Alcator C-Mod and DIII-D tokamaks. The dependence of the width of heat-load fluxes on neoclassical effects, neutral collisions, and anomalous transport is investigated using the XGC0 code. The XGC0 code includes realistic X-point geometry, a neutral source model, the effects of collisions, and a diffusion model for anomalous transport. It is observed that the width of the XGC0 neoclassical heat-load is approximately inversely proportional to the total plasma current I{sub p.} The scaling of the width of the divertor heat-load with plasma current is examined for an Alcator C-Mod discharge and four DIII-D discharges. The scaling of the divertor heat-load width with plasma current is found to be weaker in the Alcator C-Mod discharge compared to scaling found in the DIII-D discharges. The effect of neutral collisions on the 1/I{sub p} scaling of heat-load width is shown not to be significant. Although inclusion of poloidally uniform anomalous transport results in a deviation from the 1/I{sub p} scaling, the inclusion of the anomalous transport that is driven by ballooning-type instabilities results in recovering the neoclassical 1/I{sub p} scaling. The Bohm or gyro-Bohm scalings of anomalous transport do not strongly affect the dependence of the heat-load width on plasma current. The inclusion of anomalous transport, in general, results in widening the width of neoclassical divertor heat-load and enhances the neoclassical heat-load fluxes on the divertor plates. Understanding heat transport in the tokamak scrape-off layer plasmas is important for strengthening the basis for predicting divertor conditions in ITER.
- OSTI ID:
- 22490167
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 22, Issue 9; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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