Comparison of Numerical Solvers for Anisotropic Diffusion Equations Arising in Plasma Physics

This work is devoted to the comparison of numerical schemes to approximate anisotropic diffusion problems arising in tokamak plasma physics. We focus on the spatial approximation by using finite volume method and on the time discretization. This latter point is delicate since the use of explicit integrators leads to a severe restriction on the time step. Then, implicit and semi-implicit schemes are coupled to finite volumes space discretization and are compared for some classical problems relevant for magnetically confined plasmas. It appears that the semi-implicit approaches (using ARK methods or directional splitting) turn out to be the most efficient on the numerical results, especially when nonlinear problems are studied on refined meshes, using high order methods in space.