Predictions of improved confinement in SPARC via energetic particle turbulence stabilization

Nuclear Fushion

article

A. Di Siena¹  P. Rodriguez-Fernandez²  N.T. Howard²  A. Bañón Navarro¹  R. Bilato¹  T. Görler¹  E. Poli¹  G. Merlo³  J. Wright²  M. Greenwald²  F. Jenko¹ 

[1] Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics;MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center;The University of Texas at Austin

关键词: energetic particles;    gyrokinetics;    plasma turbulence;   

DOI  :  10.1088/1741-4326/acb1c7

来源: Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd.

【 摘 要 】

The recent progress in high-temperature superconductor technologies has led to the design and construction of SPARC, a compact tokamak device expected to reach plasma breakeven with up to 25 MW of external ion cyclotron resonant heating (ICRH) power. This manuscript presents local (flux-tube) and radially global gyrokinetic GENE (Jenkoet al2000Phys. Plasmas71904) simulations for a reduced-field and current H-mode SPARC scenario showing that supra-thermal particles—generated via ICRH—strongly suppress ion-scale turbulent transport by triggering a fast ion-induced anomalous transport barrier. The trigger mechanism is identified as a wave-particle resonant interaction between the fast particle population and plasma micro-instabilities (Di Sienaet al2021Phys. Rev. Lett.125025002). By performing a series of global simulations employing different profiles for the thermal ions, we show that the fusion gain of this SPARC scenario could be substantially enhanced by up to ∼80% by exploiting this fast ion stabilizing mechanism. A study is also presented to further optimize the energetic particle profiles, thus possibly leading experimentally to an even more significant fusion gain.

【 授权许可】

Unknown