Simulations of COMPASS Vertical Displacement Events with a self-consistent model for halo currents including neutrals and sheath boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully self-consistent model for simulating halo currents during VDEs in tokamaks, incorporating neutrals and sheath boundary conditions, and compares simulation results with experimental data from COMPASS.

Contribution

It presents the first self-consistent halo current model including neutrals and sheath effects, improving simulation realism and alignment with experimental measurements.

Findings

Sheath boundary conditions are crucial for realistic halo current simulations.

Plasma resistivity significantly affects the halo current profile and width.

Simulation results agree with experimental measurements of current density and heat flux.

Abstract

The understanding of the halo current properties during disruptions is key to design and operate large scale tokamaks in view of the large thermal and electromagnetic loads that they entail. For the first time, we present a fully self-consistent model for halo current simulations including neutral particles and sheath boundary conditions. The model is used to simulate Vertical Displacement Events (VDEs) occurring in the COMPASS tokamak. Recent COMPASS experiments have shown that the parallel halo current density at the plasma-wall interface is limited by the ion saturation current during VDE-induced disruptions. We show that usual MHD boundary conditions can lead to the violation of this physical limit and we implement this current density limitation through a boundary condition for the electrostatic potential. Sheath boundary conditions for the density, the heat flux, the parallel velocity and a realistic parameter choice (e.g. Spitzer $\eta$ and Spitzer-H\"arm $\chi_\parallel$ values) extend present VDE simulations beyond the state of the art. Experimental measurements of the current density, temperature and heat flux profiles at the COMPASS divertor are compared with the results obtained from axisymmetric simulations. Since the ion saturation current density ($J_{sat}$) is shown to be essential to determine the halo current profile, parametric scans are performed to study its dependence on different quantities such as the plasma resistivity and the particle and heat diffusion coefficients. In this respect, the plasma resistivity in the halo region broadens significantly the $J_{sat}$ profile, increasing the halo width at a similar total halo current.