Abstract of ELMU5 Project

A metallic wall together with target plates imposes the only natural boundary condition for tokamak plasma simulations. In numerical realizations, the complexity of the implementation of the realistic plasma-material interface is connected to formulating proper boundary conditions for the distribution function and the electromagnetic field. In addition to stable simulations, the challenge here is to implement numerical methods in such a way that physics is replicated as close as possible.

We propose to study the plasma-material boundary condition with the global electrostatic gyrokinetic full-f particle-in-cell code ELMFIRE (including kinetic electrons) in a circular magnetic equilibrium. For the study, a circular metallic wall is set as the outer boundary of the simulation region, and limiter target plates protruding from the wall and forming the scrape-of-layer region with the separatrix are set as the other material boundary. The aim is to incorporate tokamak edge physics as realistically as possible into ELMFIRE simulations by using the existing numerical methods, if possible, without any artificial tools applied at the material boundary.