Development and application of a hybrid MHD-kinetic model in JOREK

Abstract

Energetic particle (EP)-driven instabilities will be of strongly increased relevance in future burning plasmas as the EP pressure will be very large compared to the thermal plasma pressure. Understanding the interaction of EPs and bulk plasma is crucial for developing next-generation fusion devices. In this work, the JOREK magnetohydrodynamic code and its full-f kinetic particle-in-cell module are extended by an anisotropic pressure coupling model to allow for the simulation of EP instabilities at high EP pressures using realistic plasma and EP parameters. Furthermore, a diagnostic is implemented to allow for the visualization of phase-space resonances. The resulting code is first benchmarked linearly for the International Tokamak Physics Activity-toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes as well as the experiment-based ASDEX-Upgrade-NonLinear Energetic particle Dynamics cases, obtaining good agreement with other codes. Then, it is applied to a high energetic particle pressure discharge in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak using a realistic non-Maxwellian distribution of EPs, reproducing aspects of the experimentally observed instabilities. Non-linear applications are possible based on the implementation, but will require dedicated verification and validation left for future work.