Numerical validation of the refined formula of neoclassical toroidal plasma viscosity in tokamaks

Abstract

Neoclassical toroidal plasma viscosity (NTV) theory in collisionless regimes in tokamaks has been well developed in the past. The NTV evaluated from the connected formula developed by Shaing et al (2010 Nucl. Fusion 50 025020) was in good agreement with the numerical results in most cases. The boundary condition in the superbanana plateau regime has been found to be important in the numerical modelling when the resonant pitch is close to the boundaries of the pitch angle space, but it was not included in the original connected formula. This generates a big discrepancy between the numerical results and those evaluated from the smoothly connected formula as the resonant pitch is close to 0 or 1. Recently, the connected formula was refined. In this paper, we present the method of how to apply this refinement for practical NTV modelling and demonstrate the improvement of this refined formula by comparing the results evaluated from it with the numerical ones. Some techniques are developed to accurately model the NTV with the refined formula. The accuracy of the results modelled from the refined formula is strongly improved over the previous formula as the resonant pitch is close to 0 or 1 and they agree very well with the numerical ones.