Modelling of edge plasma dynamics with active wall boundary conditions

Abstract

AbstractA self‐consistent 2D model is presented for transport in boundary plasma and plasma‐facing material walls. Plasma dynamics in the domain is represented by a 2D collisional plasma fluid model in the edge‐plasma code UEDGE (Rognlien et al., J. Nucl. Mater. 196–198 (1992) 347), and transport of hydrogen and heat in the wall is represented by a system of reaction–diffusion equations in the 1D wall code FACE (Smirnov et al., Fusion Sci. Technol. 71 (2017) 75). To account for variation of parameters along the wall, in the coupled model multiple instances of the FACE code run in parallel. The coupled model provides a tool for investigating a range of dynamic plasma–material interactions phenomena in 2D. For demonstration of its capability, one application of particular interest is the role of active wall in tokamak strike point sweeping proposed for mitigation of divertor heat loads. In the present study, the coupled calculations are applied to investigation of the impact of heat and hydrogen transport in the material wall on the divertor plasma and target heat load during sweeping of the target strike point for parameters of a high‐power tokamak.