High-order Discretization of a Gyrokinetic Vlasov Model in Edge Plasma Geometry

We present a high-order spatial discretization of a continuum gyrokinetic Vlasov model in axisymmetric tokamak edge plasma geometries. Such models describe the phase space advection of plasma species distribution functions in the absence of collisions. The gyrokinetic model is posed in a four-dimensional phase space, upon which a grid is imposed when discretized. To mitigate the computational cost associated with high-dimensional grids, we employ a high-order discretization to reduce the grid size needed to achieve a given level of accuracy relative to lower-order methods. Strong anisotropy induced by the magnetic field motivates the use of mapped coordinate grids aligned with magnetic flux surfaces. The natural partitioning of the edge geometry by the separatrix between the closed and open field line regions leads to the consideration of multiple mapped blocks, in what is known as a mapped multiblock (MMB) approach. We describe the specialization of a more general formalism that we have developed for the construction of high-order, finite-volume discretizations on MMB grids, yielding the accurate evaluation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov operator, the metric factors resulting from the MMB coordinate mappings, and the interaction of blocks at adjacent boundaries. Our conservative formulation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov model incorporates the fact that the phase space velocity has zero divergence, which must be preserved discretely to avoid truncation error accumulation. We describe an approach for the discrete evaluation of the gyrokinetic phase space velocity that preserves the divergence-free property to machine precision

Numerical evaluation of line, surface and toroidal integrals on level sets of toroidally symmetric functions

We investigate strategies to numerically integrate closed lines and surfaces that are implicitly defined by level sets (iso-contours) of continuously differentiable toroidally symmetric functions. The “grid-transform” approach transforms quantities given in non-surface-aligned coordinates onto a numerically constructed surface-aligned grid. Here, line and surface integrals, as well as so-called flux-surface averages, can be easily evaluated using high order integration formulas. We compare this method to ones that base on numerical representations of the delta-function. For the grid-transform method we observe high order convergence of line, surface and volume integration. Quantitatively, the errors for line and area integration are several orders of magnitude smaller than previously reported errors for delta-function methods. Furthermore, a delta-function method based on a Gaussian representation shows qualitatively wrong results of surface integrals near O- and X-points. Contrarily, the grid transform method suffers no deterioration near O-points. However, close to X-points we observe reduced first order convergence in volume integral and derivative tests due to the diverging volume element. Our methods can be applied to toroidal and flux-surface averages in simulations of three-dimensional plasma dynamics on non-aligned grids. Further applications include closed line and surface integrals in level set methods. Efficient implementations can be found in the freely available Feltor library

High-order discretization of a gyrokinetic Vlasov model in edge plasma geometry

We describe a new spatial discretization of a continuum gyrokinetic Vlasov model in axisymmetric tokamak edge plasma geometries. The geometries are represented using a multiblock decomposition in which logically distinct blocks are smoothly mapped from rectangular computational domains and are aligned with magnetic flux surfaces to accommodate strong anisotropy induced by the magnetic field. We employ a fourth-order, finite-volume discretization in mapped coordinates to mitigate the computational expense associated with discretization on 4D phase space grids. Applied to a conservative formulation of the gyrokinetic system, a finite-volume approach expresses local conservation discretely in a natural manner involving the calculation of normal fluxes at cell faces. In the approach presented here, the normal fluxes are computed in terms of face-averaged velocity normals in such a way that (i) the divergence-free property of the gyrokinetic velocity is preserved discretely to machine precision, (ii) the configuration space normal velocities are independent of mapping metrics, and (iii) the configuration space normal velocities are computed from exact pointwise evaluation of magnetic field data except for one term. The algorithms described in this paper form the foundation of a continuum gyrokinetic edge code named COGENT, which is used here to perform a convergence study verifying the accuracy of the spatial discretization