Collisionless kinetic-fluid simulation of zonal flows in non-circular tokamaks

Abstract

Fluid simulation of linear zonal flow damping is done with a closure model based on the collisionless gyrokinetics [Sugama et al., Phys. Plasmas 14, 022502 (2007)]. Simulation results of residual zonal flow for low radial wavenumbers are compared with theoretical formulas for circular and non-circular tokamaks. The effects of the elongation and the triangularity are shown to be properly treated in the closure model. Effects of initial parallel flows on zonal flow evolution are also clarified. An appropriate choice of the initial parallel flow gives a much higher residual level than the conventional result with no initial parallel flow. Besides, the zonal flow simulations are done with the E × B nonlinearity as initial sources, which is evaluated from linear gyrokinetic microinstabilities such as ion temperature gradient modes, trapped electron modes, and electron temperature gradient modes, in order to estimate efficiency of zonal flow generation by the source instabilities.