Plasma transport coefficients for nonsymmetric toroidal confinement systems

Abstract

A variational principle is developed for computing accurate values of local plasma transport coefficients in nonsymmetric toroidal confinement configurations. Numerical solutions of the linearized drift Fokker–Planck equation are used to obtain the thermodynamic fluxes as functions of collision frequency and the radial electric field. Effects resulting from the variation of the longitudinal adiabatic invariant J along an orbit (resulting from particle transitions from helically trapped to toroidally trapped orbits) are treated. The velocity‐space distribution resulting from trapped, circulating, and transition particle orbits is well represented by a Legendre polynomial expansion in the pitch angle coordinate. The computational effort is significantly reduced from that required with Monte Carlo methods through use of an efficient treatment of the disparity between the time scales of collisionless and collisional particle dynamics. Numerical computations for a stellarator configuration are presented.