SMuK 2021 – scientific programme
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P: Fachverband Plasmaphysik
P 7: Helmholtz Graduate School III
P 7.3: Talk
Wednesday, September 1, 2021, 14:50–15:15, H4
MHD-kinetic hybrid code based on structure-preserving finite elements with particles-in-cell — •Florian Holderied1,2, Stefan Possanner1, and Xin Wang1 — 1Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Boltzmannstraße 2, 85748 Garching, Germany — 2Technical University of Munich, Arcisstraße 21, 80333 München, Germany
This talk presents a STRUcture-Preserving HYbrid code - STRUPHY - for the simulation of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) waves interacting with a small population of energetic particles (EPs) far from thermal equilibrium (kinetic species). Such configurations can appear e.g. in fusion reactors, where hot α-particles can resonantly interact with MHD waves and compromise confinement time. The implemented model features linear, ideal MHD equations in curved, 3d space, coupled nonlinearly to the full-orbit Vlasov equations via a current coupling scheme. The implemented algorithm is based on finite element exterior calculus for MHD and particle-in-cell methods for the kinetic part; it provably conserves mass, energy, and the divergence-free constraint for the magnetic field, irrespective of metric, mesh parameters and chosen order. The motivation for this work stems from the need for reliable long-time simulations of EP-physics in complex geometries. In STRUPHY, the finite element spaces are built from tensor products of univariate B-splines on the logical cuboid. Time-stepping is based on operator splitting with implicit sub-steps. After presenting the scheme, numerical results in different geometries including toroidal domains with a singularity at the magnetic axis are shown and discussed.