Numerical tools for burning plasmas

Abstract

The software stack under development within a European coordinated effort on tools for burning plasma modelling is presented. The project is organised as a Task (TSVV Task 10) under the new E-TASC initiative (X. Litaudon et al, Plasma Phys. Contr. Fusion, 64, 034005 (2022)). This is a continued effort within the EUROfusion inheriting from the earlier European coordination projects as well as research projects based at various European laboratories. The ongoing work of the TSVV Tasks is supported by the Advanced Computing Hubs. Major projects requiring the High Perfromance Computing (HPC) resources are global gyrokinetic codes and global hybrid particle-Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) codes. Also applications using the integrated modeling tools, such as the Energetic-Particle Workflow, based on the ITER Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite (IMAS), or the code package for modelling radio-frequency heating and fast-ion generation may require intensive computation and a substantial memory footprint. The continual development of these codes both on the physics side and on the HPC side allows us to tackle frontier problems, such as the interaction of turbulence with MHD-type modes in the presence of fast particles. One of the important mandated outcomes of the E-TASC project is the IMAS-enabling of EUROfusion codes and release of the software stack to the EUROfusion community.

Gyrokinetic modelling of non-linear interaction of Alfvén waves and EGAMs in ASDEX-Upgrade

“…In conclusion, through the new numerical tools implemented in ORB5 we managed to get a very good qualitative agreement between the experimental scenario simulations and the experimental findings. In spite of some quantitative disagreements, due to numerical defects in the representations of profiles and distribution functions, we are confident that this work and those carried out recently in the ORB5 context, represents a very important step toward the prediction of non-linear EP dynamics in experimentally relevant scenarios [33]. Future studies with these new numerical tools will hopefully be able to match quantitatively experimental measurements and observations, enabling us to predict EP dynamics and transport [34] also in realistic, and eventually burning plasma, scenarios.…”

ATEP: an advanced transport model for energetic particles

“…As in figure 2 we use the even n = 13 TAE at various fixed amplitudes to evolve the system, i.e. equation (1). At each time step, the energy of F EP is determined via integrating over CoM space and normalising to the initial energy E 0 :…”

“…In addition to increasingly realistic non-linear global gyrokinetic simulations [1][2][3][4][5][6], a hierarchy of theory-based reduced models is highly desirable to complement the predictions concerning the performance of future burning plasmas. Large parameter scans, sensitivity studies, and multi-scale physics describing energetic particle (EP) transport on neoclassical transport time scales require tools that go beyond what is presently feasible with first-principles numerical codes.…”