Numerical studies of toroidal resistive magnetohydrodynamic instabilities (Q1819637)

A time-stepping code has been constructed to study the dominant resistive magnetohydrodynamic instability of an axisymmetric toroidal plasma. The model used is based on the linearized, incompressible MHD equations with constant density and includes the toroidal ideal model if the resistivity is taken to be zero. The equations are solved fully implicitly using a coordinate system for which one set of coordinate surfaces coincides with a set of surfaces of constant poloidal flux. This is crucial for the accurate representation of modes for which the perturbed quantities vary rapidly near surfaces with rational values of the safety factor. The code is checked by comparison with an exactly soluble model, cylindrical resistive MHD codes and a toroidal ideal MHD code (ERATO). Results are presented showing the effect of resistivity on the unstable internal modes near \(nq_ 0=1\) for an INTOR-like numerically generated equilibrium.