1,772 research outputs found
Constraints on dynamo action in plasmas
Upper bounds are derived on the amount of magnetic energy that can be
generated by dynamo action in collisional and collisionless plasmas with and
without external forcing. A hierarchy of mathematical descriptions is
considered for the plasma dynamics: ideal MHD, visco-resistive MHD, the
double-adiabatic theory of Chew, Goldberger and Low (CGL), kinetic MHD, and
other kinetic models. It is found that dynamo action is greatly constrained in
models where the magnetic moment of any particle species is conserved. In the
absence of external forcing, the magnetic energy then remains small at all
times if it is small in the initial state. In other words, a small "seed"
magnetic field cannot be amplified significantly, regardless of the nature of
flow, as long as the collision frequency and gyroradius are small enough to be
negligible. A similar conclusion also holds if the system is subject to
external forcing as long as this forcing conserves the magnetic moment of at
least one plasma species and does not greatly increase the total energy of the
plasma (i.e., in practice, is subsonic). Dynamo action therefore always
requires collisions or some small-scale kinetic mechanism for breaking the
adiabatic invariance of the magnetic moment
Magnetic compressibility and ion-temperature-gradient-driven microinstabilities in magnetically confined plasmas
The electromagnetic theory of the strongly driven ion-temperature-gradient
(ITG) instability in magnetically confined toroidal plasmas is developed.
Stabilizing and destabilizing effects are identified, and a critical
(the ratio of the electron to magnetic pressure) for stabilization
of the toroidal branch of the mode is calculated for magnetic equilibria
independent of the coordinate along the magnetic field. Its scaling is
where is the characteristic electron
temperature gradient length, and the major radius of the torus. We
conjecture that a fast particle population can cause a similar stabilization
due to its contribution to the equilibrium pressure gradient. For sheared
equilibria, the boundary of marginal stability of the electromagnetic
correction to the electrostatic mode is also given. For a general magnetic
equilibrium, we find a critical length (for electromagnetic stabilization) of
the extent of the unfavourable curvature along the magnetic field. This is a
decreasing function of the local magnetic shear
Impurity transport in temperature gradient driven turbulence
In the present paper the transport of impurities driven by trapped electron
(TE) mode turbulence is studied. Non-linear (NL) gyrokinetic simulations using
the code GENE are compared with results from quasilinear (QL) gyrokinetic
simulations and a computationally efficient fluid model. The main focus is on
model comparisons for electron temperature gra- dient driven turbulence
regarding the sign of the convective impurity velocity (pinch) and the impurity
density gradient R/LnZ (peaking factor) for zero impurity flux. In particular,
the scaling of the impurity peaking factors with impurity charge Z and with
driving temper- ature gradient is investigated and compared with the results
for Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) driven turbulence. In addition, the impurity
peaking is compared to the main ion peaking obtained by a self-consistent fluid
calculation of the density gradients corresponding to zero particle fluxes.
For the scaling of the peaking factor with impurity charge Z, a weak
dependence is obtained from NL GENE and fluid simulations. The QL GENE results
show a stronger dependence for low Z impurities and overestimates the peaking
factor by up to a factor of two in this region. As in the case of ITG dominated
turbulence, the peaking factors saturate as Z increases, at a level much below
neoclassical predictions. However, the scaling with Z is weak or reversed as
compared to the ITG case.
The scaling of impurity peaking with the background temperature gradients is
found to be weak in the NL GENE and fluid simulations. The QL results are also
here found to significantly overestimate the peaking factor for low Z values.
For the parameters considered, the background density gradient for zero
particle flux is found to be slightly larger than the corresponding impurity
zero flux gradient.Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures. Submitted to AIP: Physics of Plasma
Comparison of particle trajectories and collision operators for collisional transport in nonaxisymmetric plasmas
In this work, we examine the validity of several common simplifying
assumptions used in numerical neoclassical calculations for nonaxisymmetric
plasmas, both by using a new continuum drift-kinetic code and by considering
analytic properties of the kinetic equation. First, neoclassical phenomena are
computed for the LHD and W7-X stellarators using several versions of the
drift-kinetic equation, including the commonly used incompressible-ExB-drift
approximation and two other variants, corresponding to different effective
particle trajectories. It is found that for electric fields below roughly one
third of the resonant value, the different formulations give nearly identical
results, demonstrating the incompressible ExB-drift approximation is quite
accurate in this regime. However, near the electric field resonance, the models
yield substantially different results. We also compare results for various
collision operators, including the full linearized Fokker-Planck operator. At
low collisionality, the radial transport driven by radial gradients is nearly
identical for the different operators, while in other cases it is found to be
important that collisions conserve momentum
Collisional transport across the magnetic field in drift-fluid models
Drift ordered fluid models are widely applied in studies of low-frequency
turbulence in the edge and scrape-off layer regions of magnetically confined
plasmas. Here, we show how collisional transport across the magnetic field is
self-consistently incorporated into drift-fluid models without altering the
drift-fluid energy integral. We demonstrate that the inclusion of collisional
transport in drift-fluid models gives rise to diffusion of particle density,
momentum and pressures in drift-fluid turbulence models and thereby obviate the
customary use of artificial diffusion in turbulence simulations. We further
derive a computationally efficient, two-dimensional model which can be time
integrated for several turbulence de-correlation times using only limited
computational resources. The model describes interchange turbulence in a
two-dimensional plane perpendicular to the magnetic field located at the
outboard midplane of a tokamak. The model domain has two regions modeling open
and closed field lines. The model employs a computational expedient model for
collisional transport. Numerical simulations show good agreement between the
full and the simplified model for collisional transport
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