Speaker
Description
The design of the ITER divertor was established via guidance of extensive scoping studies of the baseline burning conditions at $Q_\text{DT} = 10$, conducted with the SOLPS-4.3 boundary code without cross-field drifts or currents [1, 2]. Since those scoping studies, the development of the SOLPS-ITER code package, launched by the ITER Organization in 2015, has enabled numerically robust and computationally feasible inclusion of these drift and current terms in ITER-scale simulations [3 – 6].
In this work, this SOLPS-ITER capability is leveraged to revisit the previous SOLPS-4.3 database with drifts and currents to address their impact on the operational space and on the conclusions drawn in the previous studies. The work is focused on the baseline burning conditions at $Q_\text{DT} = 10$, assuming fuel and impurity injection from the top of the machine and pumping underneath the dome with 100 MW of input power to the computational domain, consistent with the original SOLPS-4.3 database [1]. An assumption that does differ from the SOLPS-4.3 database is that the new ITER baseline with the full tungsten wall is assumed in these SOLPS-ITER simulations [7]. While the original gas injection and pumping configurations are retained in this study, a complementary research contribution in this conference addresses the impact of a higher fidelity approach, including sub-divertor structures, fuel injection from the sub-divertor area, and neutral bypasses around the divertor cassette [8].
The overarching observation in this study is that while the drift and current terms do lead to visible changes in the overall plasma solution, they do not fundamentally change the overall operational space established in the earlier studies. In these ITER-scale simulations at $Q_\text{DT} = 10$ conditions with the heat flux width of about $\lambda_q \sim 3.5$ mm, the impact of drifts is a correction term that does impact the absolute values, especially approaching reattachment, but not the overall conclusions of the earlier scoping studies.
[1] H.D. Pacher, et al. J. Nucl. Mat. 463 (2015) 591-595.
[2] R.A. Pitts, et al. Nucl. Mat. Ene. 20 (2019) 100696.
[3] S. Wiesen, et al. J. Nucl. Mat. 463 (2015) 480-484.
[4] E. Kaveeva, et al. Nucl. Fusion 58 (2018) 126018.
[5] E. Kaveeva, et al. Nucl. Fusion 60 (2020) 046019.
[6] A.A. Pshenov, et al. Nucl. Mat. Ene. 42 (2025) 101851.
[7] A. Loarte, et al. Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 67 (2025) 065023.
[8] A.A. Pshenov, et al. This conference.