Minisymposium Presentation

In current fusion reactors the heat and particle loads from the scrape-off-layer (SOL) plasma to the plasma-facing components (PFCs) are one of the main limiting factors in the process of designing devices and operational scenarios for future fusion power plants. The transport into the SOL plasma is dominated by filamented structures that penetrate the last closed flux surface, the so-called blobs. Blobs are coherent structures of high density and high temperature plasma which travel through SOL in directions parallel and perpendicular to the magnetic field. The perpendicular transport can mostly be adequately described using fluid codes, but the parallel transport requires kinetic approach, since the parallel energy distribution function is often not Maxwellian. We have used a fully-kinetic 1d3v code BIT1 to simulate a flux tube in a tokamak SOL where the particle and energy source consists of a series of blobs injected at the outer midplane. We have parametrically studied the influence of source properties on the self-consistent development of SOL and target plasma. The simulations show significant effects of source temperature and blob size on the SOL particle and energy transport.