High-order discretization of a gyrokinetic Vlasov model in edge plasma geometry

DOI10.1016/J.JCP.2018.07.008zbMATH Open1416.65292arXiv1712.01978OpenAlexW2775373265WikidataQ129539748 ScholiaQ129539748MaRDI QIDQ2311643FDOQ2311643

Authors: Milo R. Dorr, Phillip Colella, Mikhail A. Dorf, Debojyoti Ghosh, Jeffrey A. Hittinger, Peter O. Schwartz 

Publication date: 4 July 2019

Published in: Journal of Computational Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We present a high-order spatial discretization of a continuum gyrokinetic Vlasov model in axisymmetric tokamak edge plasma geometries. Such models describe the phase space advection of plasma species distribution functions in the absence of collisions. The gyrokinetic model is posed in a four-dimensional phase space, upon which a grid is imposed when discretized. To mitigate the computational cost associated with high-dimensional grids, we employ a high-order discretization to reduce the grid size needed to achieve a given level of accuracy relative to lower-order methods. Strong anisotropy induced by the magnetic field motivates the use of mapped coordinate grids aligned with magnetic flux surfaces. The natural partitioning of the edge geometry by the separatrix between the closed and open field line regions leads to the consideration of multiple mapped blocks, in what is known as a mapped multiblock (MMB) approach. We describe the specialization of a more general formalism that we have developed for the construction of high-order, finite-volume discretizations on MMB grids, yielding the accurate evaluation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov operator, the metric factors resulting from the MMB coordinate mappings, and the interaction of blocks at adjacent boundaries. Our conservative formulation of the gyrokinetic Vlasov model incorporates the fact that the phase space velocity has zero divergence, which must be preserved discretely to avoid truncation error accumulation. We describe an approach for the discrete evaluation of the gyrokinetic phase space velocity that preserves the divergence-free property to machine precision.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01978

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zbMATH Keywords

finite volumehigh-ordergyrokinetictokamak edge plasmamapped-multiblock

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Vlasov equations (35Q83) Finite volume methods for initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M08) Mesh generation, refinement, and adaptive methods for the numerical solution of initial value and initial-boundary value problems involving PDEs (65M50) Applications to the sciences (65Z05)

Cites Work

• Comparison of initial value and eigenvalue codes for kinetic toroidal plasma instabilities
• Title not available (Why is that?)
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• Metric identities and the discontinuous spectral element method on curvilinear meshes
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• Block-structured adaptive mesh refinement algorithms for Vlasov simulation
• Full \(f\) gyrokinetic method for particle simulation of tokamak transport
• High-order finite-volume modeling of drift waves
• Kinetic simulation of collisional magnetized plasmas with semi-implicit time integration
• A new hybrid kinetic electron model for full-\(f\) gyrokinetic simulations

Cited In (3)

• High-order finite-volume modeling of drift waves
• Conservative fourth-order finite-volume Vlasov-Poisson solver for axisymmetric plasmas in cylindrical (\(r,v_r,v_\theta\)) phase space coordinates
• Numerical evaluation of line, surface and toroidal integrals on level sets of toroidally symmetric functions

Uses Software

• Cogent
• Chombo
• SOLPS-ITER
• gs2
• COGENT

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