Kinetic simulations of the Chodura and Debye sheaths for magnetic fields with grazing incidence

When an unmagnetized plasma comes in contact with a material surface, the difference in mobility between the electrons and the ions creates a non-neutral layer known as the Debye sheath (DS). However, in magnetic fusion devices, the open magnetic field lines intersect the structural elements of the device with near grazing incidence angles. The magnetic field tends to align the particle flow along its own field lines, thus counteracting the mechanism that leads to the formation of the DS. Recent work using a fluid model (Stangeby 2012 Nucl. Fusion 52 083012) showed that the DS disappears when the incidence angle is smaller than a critical value (around 5 degrees for ITER-like parameters). Here, we study this transition by means of numerical simulations of a kinetic model both in the collisionless and weakly collisional regimes. We show that the main features observed in the fluid model are preserved: for grazing incidence, the space charge density near the wall is reduced or suppressed, the ion flow velocity is subsonic, and the electric field and plasma density profiles are spread out over several ion Larmor radii instead of a few Debye lengths as in the unmagnetized case. As there is no singularity at the DS entrance in the kinetic model, this phenomenon depends smoothly on the magnetic field incidence angle and no particular critical angle arises. The simulation results and the predictions of the fluid model are in good agreement, although some discrepancies subsist, mainly due to the assumptions of isothermal closure and diagonality of the pressure tensor in the fluid model.