Avoiding impurity accumulation is a requirement for steady-state stellarator
operation. The accumulation of impurities can be heavily affected by variations
in their density on the flux-surface. Using recently derived semi-analytic
expressions for the transport of a collisional impurity species with high-Z
and flux-surface density-variation in the presence of a low-collisionality bulk
ion species, we numerically optimize the impurity density-variation on the
flux-surface to minimize the radial peaking factor of the impurities. These
optimized density-variations can reduce the core impurity density by 0.75Z
(with Z the impurity charge number) in the Large Helical Device case
considered here, and by 0.89Z in a Wendelstein 7-X standard configuration
case. On the other hand, when the same procedure is used to find
density-variations that maximize the peaking factor, it is notably increased
compared to the case with no density-variation. This highlights the potential
importance of measuring and controlling these variations in experiments.Comment: 19 figures, 17 pages. Accepted into Nuclear Fusio