Numerical MHD simulations are used to gain insight into how sawteeth are affected by three-dimensional shaping from the Compact Toroidal Hybrid (CTH) stellarator field. CTH is a small stellarator-tokamak hybrid and sawteeth are sometimes seen on soft x-ray signals when operating with tokamak like profiles. We use NIMROD to compute numerical solutions having repeated sawtooth relaxations for a sequence of configurations with increasing helical stellarator field strength. The experimentally observed trend of the sawtooth period decreasing as the helical field strength is increased is recovered in the simulations. Careful attention to numerical convergence was required to obtain the results, and these considerations may be relevant to simulations of other phenomena in devices with non-axisymmetric plasmas such as perturbed tokamaks, RFPs, and stellarators.
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September 2016
Research Article|
September 30 2016
Simulations of sawtoothing in a current carrying stellarator
N. A. Roberds
;
N. A. Roberds
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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L. Guazzotto;
L. Guazzotto
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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J. D. Hanson;
J. D. Hanson
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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J. L. Herfindal;
J. L. Herfindal
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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E. C. Howell;
E. C. Howell
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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D. A. Maurer
;
D. A. Maurer
1Department of Physics,
Auburn University
, Auburn, Alabama 36849, USA
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C. R. Sovinec
C. R. Sovinec
2Department of Engineering Physics,
University of Wisconsin
, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
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Phys. Plasmas 23, 092513 (2016)
Article history
Received:
June 23 2016
Accepted:
September 02 2016
Citation
N. A. Roberds, L. Guazzotto, J. D. Hanson, J. L. Herfindal, E. C. Howell, D. A. Maurer, C. R. Sovinec; Simulations of sawtoothing in a current carrying stellarator. Phys. Plasmas 1 September 2016; 23 (9): 092513. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4962990
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