Full Wave Simulation of Lower Hybrid Waves in ITER Plasmas Based on the Finite Element Method

Abstract

The first lower hybrid (LH) full wave simulation of an ITER-scale plasma is presented. LHEAF [O. Meneghini et al., Phys. Plasmas 16, (2009)], an efficient LH full wave solver based on Finite Element Method (FEM) was used. In this study the scalability of the LHEAF approach was investigated, and the possibility of using massive parallel computer for solving extremely large problems was shown. In reactor scale plasmas, LH waves having a typical n|| ≈ 2 are expected to be absorbed in the periphery of the plasma. In order to exploit the spatial localization of the LH waves, LHEAF is modified to consider only the region of plasma where the wave fields are non-zero. By this approach, the size of the computational domain was reduced by more than a factor of 10. In this simulation, the magnetic equilibrium and the density and temperature profiles proposed for AT operation scenario on ITER are used. In addition, the wide SOL is supposed to play an important role in the propagation of the LH waves on ITER, and its presence was included in the simulation. For a Maxwellian plasma the power deposition profile is narrow and peaks at r/a ≈ 0.7.