Model Comparison in Plasma Energy Confinement Scaling

Abstract

Energy confinement data of large fusion experiments have been analyzed in terms of dimensionless form free scaling functions. Several possible physical scenarios lead to different models with a certain number of degrees of freedom. These are used to set up the confinement fonction as a linear combination of dimensionless power law terms. Then one has to solve the problem, given a particular plasma model which is the optimum number of terms in the expansion, and which model is most likely in the light of the data. Based upon data containing the energy content for a wide variety of variable settings, predictions for single variable scans are made and compared to actual experiments. A very good agreement is obtained.