33 research outputs found
Arbitrarily high-order energy-preserving methods for simulating the gyrocenter dynamics of charged particles
Gyrocenter dynamics of charged particles plays a fundamental role in plasma
physics. In particular, accuracy and conservation of energy are important
features for correctly performing long-time simulations. For this purpose, we
here propose arbitrarily high-order energy conserving methods for its
simulation. The analysis and the efficient implementation of the methods are
fully described, and some numerical tests are reported.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure
A gyrokinetic model for the plasma periphery of tokamak devices
A gyrokinetic model is presented that can properly describe strong flows,
large and small amplitude electromagnetic fluctuations occurring on scale
lengths ranging from the electron Larmor radius to the equilibrium
perpendicular pressure gradient scale length, and large deviations from thermal
equilibrium. The formulation of the gyrokinetic model is based on a second
order description of the single charged particle dynamics, derived from Lie
perturbation theory, where the fast particle gyromotion is decoupled from the
slow drifts, assuming that the ratio of the ion sound Larmor radius to the
perpendicular equilibrium pressure scale length is small. The collective
behavior of the plasma is obtained by a gyrokinetic Boltzmann equation that
describes the evolution of the gyroaveraged distribution function and includes
a non-linear gyrokinetic Dougherty collision operator. The gyrokinetic model is
then developed into a set of coupled fluid equations referred to as the
gyrokinetic moment hierarchy. To obtain this hierarchy, the gyroaveraged
distribution function is expanded onto a velocity-space Hermite-Laguerre
polynomial basis and the gyrokinetic equation is projected onto the same basis,
obtaining the spatial and temporal evolution of the Hermite-Laguerre expansion
coefficients. The Hermite-Laguerre projection is performed accurately at
arbitrary perpendicular wavenumber values. Finally, the self-consistent
evolution of the electromagnetic fields is described by a set of gyrokinetic
Maxwell's equations derived from a variational principle, with the velocity
integrals of the gyroaveraged distribution function explicitly evaluated
ORB5: a global electromagnetic gyrokinetic code using the PIC approach in toroidal geometry
This paper presents the current state of the global gyrokinetic code ORB5 as
an update of the previous reference [Jolliet et al., Comp. Phys. Commun. 177
409 (2007)]. The ORB5 code solves the electromagnetic Vlasov-Maxwell system of
equations using a PIC scheme and also includes collisions and strong flows. The
code assumes multiple gyrokinetic ion species at all wavelengths for the
polarization density and drift-kinetic electrons. Variants of the physical
model can be selected for electrons such as assuming an adiabatic response or a
``hybrid'' model in which passing electrons are assumed adiabatic and trapped
electrons are drift-kinetic. A Fourier filter as well as various control
variates and noise reduction techniques enable simulations with good
signal-to-noise ratios at a limited numerical cost. They are completed with
different momentum and zonal flow-conserving heat sources allowing for
temperature-gradient and flux-driven simulations. The code, which runs on both
CPUs and GPUs, is well benchmarked against other similar codes and analytical
predictions, and shows good scalability up to thousands of nodes
Long term analysis of splitting methods for charged-particle dynamics
In this paper, we rigorously analyze the energy, momentum and magnetic moment
behaviours of two splitting methods for solving charged-particle dynamics. The
near-conservations of these invariants are given for the system under constant
magnetic field or quadratic electric potential. By the approach named as
backward error analysis, we derive the modified equations and modified
invariants of the splitting methods and based on which, the near-conservations
over long times are proved. Some numerical experiments are presented to
demonstrate these long time behaviours