Fully implicit kinetic solution of collisional plasmas (Q1371987)

We describe a numerical technique, matrix-free Newton-Krylov, for solving a single species, stationary, one spatial dimension, one velocity dimension, Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation. It is demonstrated that efficient steady-state solutions to the nonlinear integrodifferential equation can be achieved, obtaining quadratic convergence, but not incurring the large memory requirements of an integral operator. We present a model problem which describes ion transport in the edge plasma of a tokamak fusion reactor, and use this model problem to demonstrate the performance of the new solution method.