Abstract Details
Abstracts
Author: Stefan Tirkas
Requested Type: Poster
Submitted: 2026-03-20 16:44:12
Co-authors: B. Dudson, B. Zhu
Contact Info:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2963 College Ave Apt 251
Livermore, CA 94550
USA
Abstract Text:
Flux-Coordinate-Independent Extension to BOUT++/HERMES-3
Stefan Tirkas, Ben Dudson and Ben Zhu
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Realizing commercially viable fusion power plants (FPPs) demands whole-device modeling efforts which integrate high‐fidelity plasma simulations with engineering systems and design capabilities. Among the most pressing challenges are the accurate prediction of heat and particle exhaust in the divertor region and the self‐consistent treatment of plasma–neutral and plasma–wall interactions in the edge and scrape‐off layer. In this work, the BOUT++/Hermes-3 [1] fluid framework is extended with a Cartesian flux-coordinate-independent (FCI) discretization [2], enabling full-device transport and turbulence studies from the core to the first wall. To fully characterize the plasma, the device wall is represented as an immersed boundary [3], from which boundary conditions are imposed on the perpendicular diffusion and advection terms. These terms are discretized using a finite-volume formulation, and plasma cells intersected by the boundary are treated using a cut-cell discretization method [4]. The parallel discretization and associated boundary conditions are presently inherited from the quasi-FCI implementation BSTING [5].
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-2008877
[1] B. Dudson, M. Kryjak, H. Muhammed, P. Hill, and J. Omotani Comp. Phys. Comm. 296 108991 (2024)
[2] F. Hariri and M. Ottaviani Comp. Phys. Comm. 184 2419-2429 (2013)
[3] R. Ghias, R. Mittal, and H. Dong Journal of Computational Physics 225 528–553 (2007)
[4] H. Johansen and P. Colella Journal of Computational Physics 147, 60-85 (1998)
[5] B. Shanahan, B. Dudson, and P. Hill Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 61 025007 (2019)
Characterization: 5.0
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