Mathematical Modeling of Plasma Transport in a Helical Magnetic Field

Abstract The paper presents a mathematical model of the plasma transport in a helical magnetic field for a new SMOLA device for plasma confinement, created at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS). Confinement is carried out due to momentum transfer from a magnetic field with helical symmetry to a rotating plasma. The stationary equation of plasma transport in the axially symmetric formulation contains the second derivatives, including mixed ones. The variable coefficients have a complex form and contain experimentally obtained dependencies. The model is implemented by using the establishment method, the Douglas–Rachford scheme and the tridiagonal matrix algorithm. The distribution of the substance concentration obtained by numerical simulation has a qualitative correspondence with the data of field experiments. The created model makes it possible to obtain dependencies of the integral characteristics of the plasma on the depth of the magnetic field corrugation, diffusion and plasma potential.