Guillaume Latu

Guillaume Latu, Virginie Grandgirard, Jérémie Abiteboul et al.

Inaccurate description of the equilibrium can yield to spurious effects in gyrokinetic turbulence simulations. Also, the Vlasov solver and time integration schemes impact the conservation of physical quantities, especially in long-term simulations. Equilibrium and Vlasov solver have to be tuned in order to preserve constant states (equilibrium) and to provide good conservation property along time (mass to begin with). Several illustrative simple test cases are given to show typical spurious effects that one can observes for poor settings. We explain why Forward Semi-Lagrangian scheme bring us some benefits. Some toroidal and cylindrical GYSELA runs are shown that use FSL.

Jerome Guterl, Jean-Philippe Braeunig, Nicolas Crouseilles et al.

The purpose of this work is simulation of magnetised plasmas in the ITER project framework. In this context, Vlasov-Poisson like models are used to simulate core turbulence in the tokamak in a toroidal geometry. This leads to heavy simulation because a 6D dimensional problem has to be solved, 3D in space and 3D in velocity. The model is reduced to a 5D gyrokinetic model, taking advantage of the particular motion of particles due to the presence of a strong magnetic field. However, accurate schemes, parallel algorithms need to be designed to bear these simulations. This paper describes a Hermite formulation of the conservative PSM scheme which is very generic and allows to implement different semi-Lagrangian schemes. We also test and propose numerical limiters which should improve the robustness of the simulations by diminishing spurious oscillations. We only consider here the 4D drift-kinetic model which is the backbone of the 5D gyrokinetic models and relevant to build a robust and accurate numerical method.