Microturbulent transport of non-Maxwellian alpha particles
| dc.contributor.advisor | Dorland, William | en_US |
| dc.contributor.author | Wilkie, George John | en_US |
| dc.contributor.department | Physics | en_US |
| dc.contributor.publisher | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland | en_US |
| dc.contributor.publisher | University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2016-02-06T06:43:39Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2016-02-06T06:43:39Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | A burning Deuterium-Tritium plasma is one which depends upon fusion-produced alpha particles for self-heating. Whether a plasma can reach a burning state requires knowledge of the transport of alpha particles, and turbulence is one such source of transport. The alpha particle distribution in collisional equilibrium forms a non-Maxwellian tail which spans orders of magnitude in energy, and it is this tail that is responsible for heating the plasma. Newly-born high-energy alpha particles are not expected to respond to turbulence as strongly as alpha particles that have slowed down to the bulk plasma temperature. This dissertation presents a low-collisionality derivation of gyrokinetics relevant for alpha particles and describes the upgrades made to the GS2 flux-tube code to handle general non-Maxwellian energy distributions. With the ability to run self-consistent simulations with a population of alpha particles, we can examine certain assumptions commonly made about alpha particles in the context of microturbulence. It is found that microturbulence can compete with collisional slowing-down, altering the distribution further. One assumption that holds well in electrostatic turbulence is the trace approximation, which is built upon to develop a model for efficiently calculating the coupled radial-energy turbulent transport of a non-Maxwellian species. A new code was written for this purpose and corrections to the global alpha particle heating profile due to microturbulence in an ITER-like scenario are presented along with sensitivity studies. | en_US |
| dc.identifier | https://doi.org/10.13016/M2PM7Q | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/17302 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.subject.pqcontrolled | Plasma physics | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | alpha particles | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | computational | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | fusion | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | gyrokinetics | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | transport | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | turbulence | en_US |
| dc.title | Microturbulent transport of non-Maxwellian alpha particles | en_US |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en_US |
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