Advanced 3-D electron kinetic calculations for the current drive problem in magnetically confined thermonuclear plasmas
Résumé
Accurate and fast electron kinetic calculations is a challenging issue for realistic simulations of thermonuclear tokamak plasmas. Relativistic corrections and electron trajectory effects must be fully taken into account for high temperature burning plasmas, while codes should also consistently describe wave-particle resonant interactions in presence of locally large gradients close to internal transport barrier. In that case, neoclassical effects may come into play and self-consistent evaluation of both the radio-frequency and bootstrap currents must be performed. In addition, a complex interplay between momentum and radial electron dynamics may take place, in presence of a possible energy dependent radial transport. Besides the physics needs, there are considerable numerical issues to solve, in order to reduce computer time consumption and memory requirements at an acceptable level, so that kinetic calculations may be valuably incorporated in a chain of codes which determines plasma equilibrium and wave propagation. So far, fully implicit 3-D calculations based a finite difference scheme and a incomplete LU factorization have been found to be so most effective method to reach this goal. A review of the present status in this active field of physics is presented, with an emphasis on possible future improvements
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