Abstracts and PDFs - F.J. Casson
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Gyrokinetic simulations including the centrifugal force in a rotating tokamak plasma
F.J. Casson, A.G. Peeters, C. Angioni, Y. Camenen, W.A. Hornsby, A.P. Snodin, and G. Szepesi
Physics of Plasmas, 17, 102305 (2010)
Tokamak experiments operate with a rotating plasma, with toroidal velocity which can be driven externally but can also arise spontaneously. In the frame that corotates with the plasma, the effects of the centrifugal force are felt through a centrifugal drift and an enhanced mirror force [A.G. Peeters et al. Physics of Plasmas 16, 042310, (2009)]. These inertial terms become important in the case of strong rotation, as is common in spherical devices, and are also important for heavy impurity ions even at small toroidal velocities. In this work, the first gyrokinetic simulations including the centrifugal force in a strongly rotating plasma are presented. The enhanced mirror force redistributes density over a flux surface, and modifies the trapping condition, destabilising trapped electron modes. At intermediate scales this can result in promotion of the trapped electron mode over the ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode as the dominant instability, which under marginal conditions could result in an enhanced electron heat flux. The centrifugal drift acts to damp the residual zonal flow of the geoacoustic mode, whilst its frequency is increased. For nonlinear ITG dominated turbulence, increased trapped electron drive and reduced zonal flow lead to an increase in ion heat diffusivity if the increased rotation is not accompanied by rotational shear stabilisation. An increased fraction of slow trapped electrons enhances the convective particle pinch, leading to an increase in the steady state density gradient with strong rotation. Linear ITG mode results show an increased pinch of heavy trace impurities due to their strong centrifugal trapping. ©2010 American Institute of Physics
Copyright (2010) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics.
The following article appeared in Physics of Plasmas, 17, 102305 (2010) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?PHP/ 
doi: 10.1063/1.3491110
Anomalous parallel momentum transport due to E x B flow shear in a tokamak plasma
F.J. Casson, A.G. Peeters, Y. Camenen, W.A. Hornsby, A.P. Snodin, D. Strintzi and G. Szepesi
Physics of Plasmas, 16, 092303 (2009)
Nondiffusive anomalous momentum transport in toroidal plasmas occurs through symmetry breaking mechanisms. In this paper the contribution of sheared E×B flows to parallel momentum transport [R. R. Dominguez and G. M. Staebler, Phys Fluids B 5, 3876 (1993)] is investigated with nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations in toroidal geometry. The background perpendicular shear is treated independently from the parallel velocity shear to isolate a nondiffusive, nonpinch contribution to the parallel momentum flux. It is found that the size of the term depends strongly on the magnetic shear, with the sign reversing for negative magnetic shear. Perpendicular shear flows are responsible for both symmetry breaking and suppression of turbulence, resulting in a shearing rate at which there is a maximum contribution to the momentum transport. The E×B momentum transport is shown to be quenched by increasing flow shear more strongly than the standard linear quench rule for turbulent heat diffusivity. ©2009 American Institute of Physics
Copyright (2009) American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics.
The following article appeared in Physics of Plasmas, 16, 092303 (2009) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?PHP/
doi: 10.1063/1.3227650
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