Development and testing of an unstructured mesh method for whole plasma gyrokinetic simulations in realistic tokamak geometry

Abstract

In this work, we have formulated and implemented a mixed unstructured mesh-based finite element–Fourier decomposition scheme for gyrokinetic simulations in realistic tokamak geometry. An efficient particle positioning (particle-triangle mapping) scheme for the charge deposition and field scattering using an intermediate grid as the search index for triangles has been implemented, and a significant speed-up by a factor of ∼30 is observed as compared with the brute force scheme for a medium-size simulation. The TRIMEG (TRIangular MEsh based Gyrokinetic) code has been developed. As an application, the ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode is simulated using the simplified gyrokinetic Vlasov-Poisson model. Our simulation and that using the ORB5 code for the DIII-D Cyclone case show reasonable agreement. As an additional application, ITG simulations using an ASDEX Upgrade equilibrium have been performed with density and temperature gradient profiles similar to the Cyclone case. Capabilities of the TRIMEG code for simulations with realistic experimental equilibria in the plasma core and in the whole plasma volume with open field lines are demonstrated.