Modelling of plasma behaviour in the vicinity of intensive impurity sources

Abstract

Plasma behaviour in the vicinity of strong sources of impurities is considered by taking into account quasi-neutrality, Coulomb collisions of background particles with impurity ions, radiation losses and sinks of charged particles to bounding material surfaces. If several ion species are present in the plasma the generalized Bohm criterion requires that a certain function of the main ion velocity changes its sign when moving along the magnetic field from the distant plasma through the impurity source to the surface. This allows us to formulate the ‘regularity’ conditions for the motion equation of the main ions and a numerical approach to find the only physical solution without singularities is elaborated. Calculations of plasma parameters in the shadow of a limiter, through which impurities are injected, have been done for the conditions of impurity seeding experiments in the tokamak TEXTOR.