Hu, Y.; Miecnikowski, M.T.; Chen, Y.; Parker, S.E. Fully Kinetic Simulation of Ion-Temperature-Gradient Instabilities in Tokamaks. plasma2018, 1, 10.
Hu, Y.; Miecnikowski, M.T.; Chen, Y.; Parker, S.E. Fully Kinetic Simulation of Ion-Temperature-Gradient Instabilities in Tokamaks. plasma 2018, 1, 10.
Hu, Y.; Miecnikowski, M.T.; Chen, Y.; Parker, S.E. Fully Kinetic Simulation of Ion-Temperature-Gradient Instabilities in Tokamaks. plasma2018, 1, 10.
Hu, Y.; Miecnikowski, M.T.; Chen, Y.; Parker, S.E. Fully Kinetic Simulation of Ion-Temperature-Gradient Instabilities in Tokamaks. plasma 2018, 1, 10.
Abstract
The feasibility of using full ion kinetics, instead of gyrokinetics, in simulating low-frequency Ion-Temperature-Gradient (ITG) instabilities in tokamaks has recently been demonstrated by Sturdevant et al. [Physics of Plasmas24, 081207 (2017)]. In that work, a variational integrator was developed to integrate the full orbits of ions in toroidal geometry, which proved to be accurate in capturing both the short-time scale cyclotron motion and long time scale drift motion. The present work extends that work in three aspects. First, we implement a relatively simple full orbit integrator, the Boris integrator, and demonstrate that the accuracy of this integrator is also sufficient for simulation of ITG instabilities. Second, the equilibrium magnetic configuration is extended to general toroidal configuration specified numerically, enabling simulation of realistic equilibria reconstructed from tokamak experiments. Third, we extend that work to the nonlinear regime and investigate the nonlinear saturation of ITG instabilities. To verify the new numerical implementation of the orbit integrator and magnetic configuration, the linear electrostatic ITG frequency and growth rate are compared with those given in Sturdevant's work and good agreement is found.
Keywords
fully kinetic ions; ion temperature gradient instabilities; tokamak; gyrokinetics; particle-in-cell
Subject
Physical Sciences, Fluids and Plasmas Physics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
