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Author: Francesco Ceccherini
Requested Type: Poster
Submitted: 2016-02-15 08:04:48

Co-authors: Sean Dettrick, Dan Barnes, Laura Galeotti, Victor Guerrero, Doug Hendrix, Kevin Hubbard, Richard Milroy, Ales Necas and the TAE Team

Contact Info:
Tri Alpha Energy, Inc.
P.O. Box 7010
Rancho Santa Margarita, CA   92688
United States of Ame

Abstract Text:
The goal of the C-2U experiment [1] is to use neutral beam heating and edge biasing to sustain an advanced beam-driven FRC for many milliseconds, longer than all characteristic system time scales such as the growth times of known instabilities and the resistive wall time. A new 3D quasineutral hybrid code, FPIC, is being developed to assist and guide experiments with TAE’s present and future machines. In particular, thanks to the ion fully kinetic treatment, FPIC allows to carry out stability studies in regimes where standard finite Larmor radius approximations are inapplicable. FPIC is based on Ohm’s law and among other features, it includes multiple species, staggered grids, cut cell boundaries, arbitrary boundary shapes, CPU and GPU pushers, MPI parallelization and the option to choose between zero and finite electron mass. Here we present a first application of FPIC to the investigation of low order modes in FRC plasmas and discuss the instabilities’ main dynamics. We focus our attention on the role played by the plasma resistivity, in terms of both its amplitude and dependences. Different equilibria featuring various elongations and FRC parameters have also been taken into account and we address the possible correlations between plasma and instability characteristics.

[1] M.W. Binderbauer et al., Phys. Plasmas 22, 056110 (2015).

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