Neoclassical transport in stellarators

Abstract

The stellarator neoclassical transport caused by particles trapped in local helical wells is calculated in the low-collisionality regime using a systematic expansion. The behavior of electron transport is found to be the same over a wide range of energies but the behavior of ion transport for low-energy ions is found to be different than that for high-energy ions. Furthermore, the electron fluxes do not vary with the change in the radial ambipolar electric field nearly as much as do the ion fluxes. Thus the particle diffusion is controlled by the electrons. A nonradial ambipolar electric field is induced by ion drift. This electric field enhances the transport by about 15%–20%. A convenient graphical method that allows one to determine the magnitude of the radial ambipolar field for machines with different parameters is presented. Numerical examples show that electron energy confinement time is comparable to the ion energy confinement time for all the different size stellarators studied. Although the neoclassical losses are large, it is shown that ignition can be achieved in a reasonably sized stellarator reactor. Finally, fron the standpoint of reactor economics, the confinement scaling law shows that in order to increase nτ, it is better to increase the aspect ratio than the overall dimensions of the reactor.