Abstract of KIPPADV Project

The "KInetic code for Plasma Periphery" (KIPP), developed at IPP/Garching, was created as a tool to study kinetic effects of parallel plasma transport in the scrape-off layer and divertor. Experience gained from the outcome of code runs should form a scientific basis for implementation of kinetic effects (such as heat flux limiters/enhancements) in the present day 2D fluid codes such as SOLPS. Test runs of KIPP demonstrated the code's stability and extreme accuracy. Benchmarks carried out in the limit of strong collisionality demonstrated good match to analytical expressions with accuracy within 1% for most important transport coefficients: plasma electric conductivity, ion-electron energy equipartition rate for realistic ratio of deuteron to electron mass, parallel heat conduction and ion-electron thermoforce. The code's application to modelling real experimental profiles is presently hampered by its insufficient speed. Code optimisation for the speed of execution has been an integral part of its development right from the beginning. The critical issue for the code's speed up: MPI parallelisation enabling the most CPU consuming operations of Coulomb collisions to be split among large number of processors, each dedicated to a separate spatial location, has been successfully implemented. It is believed however that involvement of computational experts in the code optimisation can result in a further considerable speedup of this code.