UC San Diego

Magnetic confinement devices use strong magnetic fields to confine fusion grade plasmas for the purpose of producing fusion energy. Fully understanding plasma transport in these devices is crucial for the realization of a fusion reactor. The plasma transport is governed mostly by anomalous (turbulent) processes. Furthermore, the edge region is characterized by strong gradients in plasma profiles leading to coherent convecting structures known as plasma blobs that can dominant the far edge transport. This Thesis work is concerned with a characterization of plasma blob dynamics through a combination of theoretical investigations and 3D simulations of the collisional Braginskii equations using the code BOUT++. Another topic of this Thesis is the modeling of mean profile evolution due to fluctuating anomalous transport. The model is a formulated as a kinetic extension of fluid models and is implemented into the 2D2V gyrokinetic code COGENT