Simulation of Thermal, Particle, Impurity, and Momentum Transport in NSTX Discharges Using the Multi-Mode Anomalous Transport Module

T. Rafiq, C. Wilson, J. Weiland, E. Schuster

Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society (APS)

Spokane, WA, USA, October 17-21, 2022

The theory-based multi-species multi-fluid multi-mode anomalous transport module (MMM) [T. Rafiq et al. Phys Plasmas 20, 032506 (2013)] is utilized to calculate electron/ion thermal, electron particle, impurity, toroidal, and poloidal momentum transport in low, medium, and high collisionality NSTX discharges. The effects of isotope mass on transport are also investigated. The ion thermal transport is found to be close to zero in the core of NSTX plasmas with equilibrium flow shear. The results agree with NSTX experiments and gyrokinetic ion-scale simulation on the fact that ion thermal transport is neoclassical. The electron thermal transport is found to be anomalous due to unstable electron temperature gradients and microtearing modes. The latest version of MMM includes ion and electron temperature gradient modes, trapped electron modes, peeling and kinetic ballooning modes, drift Alfven modes, microtearing modes, ideal MHD, and drift resistive inertial ballooning modes. The goal is to implement MMM in the integrated modeling code TRANSP in order to not only compute the temperature, density, current, rotation, and other profiles that are measured in existing experiments, but to also extrapolate these predictions to future planned devices.

*Supported by the US DOE DE-SC0021385 and DE-SC0013977.