A fully non-linear multi-species Fokker–Planck–Landau collision operator for simulation of fusion plasma

Fusion edge plasmas can be far from thermal equilibrium and require the use of a non-linear collision operator for accurate numerical simulations. In this article, the non-linear single-species Fokker–Planck–Landau collision operator developed by Yoon and Chang (2014) [9] is generalized to include m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of computational physics 2016-06, Vol.315
Main Authors: Hager, Robert, Yoon, E.S., Ku, S., D'Azevedo, E.F., Worley, P.H., Chang, C.S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ALGORITHMS
CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSICS
COLLISIONS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
FOKKER-PLANCK EQUATION
IMPLEMENTATION
NONLINEAR PROBLEMS
PLASMA
THERMAL EQUILIBRIUM
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Summary:Fusion edge plasmas can be far from thermal equilibrium and require the use of a non-linear collision operator for accurate numerical simulations. In this article, the non-linear single-species Fokker–Planck–Landau collision operator developed by Yoon and Chang (2014) [9] is generalized to include multiple particle species. The finite volume discretization used in this work naturally yields exact conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. The implementation of this new non-linear Fokker–Planck–Landau operator in the gyrokinetic particle-in-cell codes XGC1 and XGCa is described and results of a verification study are discussed. Finally, the numerical techniques that make our non-linear collision operator viable on high-performance computing systems are described, including specialized load balancing algorithms and nested OpenMP parallelization. The collision operator's good weak and strong scaling behavior are shown.
ISSN:0021-9991