The GBS code for the self-consistent simulation of plasma turbulence and kinetic neutral dynamics in the tokamak boundary

A new version of GBS (Ricci et al. (2012) [27]; Halpern et al. J. Comput. Phys. 315 (2016) 388-408; Paruta et al. (2018) [11]) is described. GBS is a three-dimensional, fluxdriven, global, two-fluid turbulence code developed for the self-consistent simulation of plasma turbulence and kinetic neutral dynamics in the tokamak boundary. In the new version presented here, the simulation domain is extended to encompass the whole plasma volume, avoiding an artificial boundary with the core, hence retaining the core-edgeSOL interplay. A toroidal coordinate system is introduced to increase the code flexibility, allowing for the simulation of arbitrary magnetic configurations (e.g. single-null, doublenull and snowflake configurations), which can also be the result of the equilibrium reconstruction of an experimental discharge. The implementation of a new iterative solver for the Poisson and Ampere equations is presented, leading to a remarkable speed-up of the code with respect to the use of direct solvers, therefore allowing for efficient electromagnetic simulations that avoid the use of the Boussinesq approximation. The selfconsistent kinetic neutral model, initially developed for limited configurations, is ported to the magnetic configurations considered by the present version of GBS and carefully optimized. A new MPI parallelisation is implemented to evolve the plasma and neutral models in parallel, thus improving the code scalability. The numerical implementation of the plasma and neutral models is verified by means of the method of manufactured solutions. As an example of the simulation capabilities of the new version of GBS, a simulation of a TCV tokamak discharge is presented. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

This paper describes a new version of the GBS code that extends the simulation domain to encompass the entire plasma volume and introduces a toroidal coordinate system for increased flexibility. A new iterative solver for Poisson and Ampere equations is implemented, leading to faster code execution. The self-consistent kinetic neutral model is optimized for different magnetic configurations. The numerical implementation is verified using the method of manufactured solutions. A simulation of a TCV tokamak discharge is presented as an example.