Speaker
Description
Currently several new magnetically confined fusion experiments are being built or planned. Many plan to operate using deuterium-tritium fuel with the aim of studying the burning plasma physics regime. Numerical simulations related to fusion-born alpha particle confinement are playing a key role in optimising these experiments. Similarly, auxiliary heating schemes such as neutral beam ion heating and ion cyclotron resonance heating are being modelled.
ASCOT5 is an orbit-following code that solves the distribution function of a fast-ion species by computing their orbits in a 3D geometry; either full gyro-orbit (FO) or guiding centre (GC) motion can be solved. In the spirit of continuous development, three major additions to ASCOT5 were made during the year 2024. Firstly, ASCOT5 was interfaced with IMAS IDS with the actor being currently in development. Secondly, the FO-simulations with reduced physics models can now be run on a GPU. And finally, for the GC-simulations, the ability to include IC-heating in a tokamak geometry was added and is now in the testing phase.
The ICRH was implemented by coupling ASCOT5 to the RF interactions in Orbit Following codes (RFOF) library. The RFOF-ASCOT5 coupling was benchmarked against RFOF-ASCOT4 and compared to an analytical solution. The agreement is fair but not excellent suggesting a minor flaw in the RFOF-ASCOT5 implementation. The next step for ICRH simulations in ASCOT5 would be to extend it to full-orbit simulations and for stellarators. For GPU ASCOT5, the next milestone is porting also the guiding centre simulations to GPUs with wider physics models. To conclude, the implementation work is ongoing and continues during the year 2025.
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