Approach to nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic simulations in stellarator geometry

Abstract

The capability to model the nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) evolution of stellarator plasmas is developed by extending the M3D-$C^1$ code to allow non-axisymmetric domain geometry. We introduce a set of logical coordinates, in which the computational domain is axisymmetric, to utilize the existing finite-element framework of M3D-$C^1$. A $C^1$ coordinate mapping connects the logical domain to the non-axisymmetric physical domain, where we use the M3D-$C^1$ extended MHD models essentially without modifications. We present several numerical verifications on the implementation of this approach, including simulations of the heating, destabilization, and equilibration of stellarator plasmas with strongly anisotropic thermal conductivity, and of the relaxation of stellarator equilibria to integrable and non-integrable magnetic field configurations in realistic geometries.

arXiv comment8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Computation of multi-region relaxed magnetohydrodynamic equilibria
• Testing of the new JOREK stellarator-capable model in the tokamak limit

Cited by in corpus (7)

• JOREK3D: An extension of the JOREK nonlinear MHD code to stellarators
• Benign saturation of ideal ballooning instability in a high-performance stellarator
• Nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic modeling of current-drive-induced sawtooth-like crashes in the W7-X stellarator
• Bootstrap Current Modeling in M3D-C1
• Construction of an invertible mapping to boundary conforming coordinates for arbitrarily shaped toroidal domains
• Sawtooth crash in tokamak as a sequence of Multi-region Relaxed MHD equilibria
• Nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic modeling of ideal ballooning modes in high-$\beta$ Wendelstein 7-X plasmas