Impurities in a non-axisymmetric plasma: transport and effect on bootstrap current

Albert Mollén, Matt Landreman, Håkan M. Smith, Stefanie Braun, Per Helander

Published 2015-04-19Version 1

Impurities cause radiation losses and plasma dilution, and in stellarator plasmas the neoclassical ambipolar radial electric field is often unfavorable for avoiding strong impurity peaking. In this work we use a new continuum drift-kinetic solver, the SFINCS code (the Stellarator Fokker-Planck Iterative Neoclassical Conservative Solver) [M. Landreman et al., Phys. Plasmas 21 (2014) 042503] which employs the full linearized Fokker-Planck operator, to calculate neoclassical impurity transport coefficients for a Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) magnetic configuration. We compare SFINCS calculations with theoretical asymptotes in the high collisionality limit. In intermediate and high collisionality regimes, a momentum conserving collision operator is critical to correctly determine the impurity transport coefficients, and a simple pitch-angle scattering approximation can lead to transport predictions in the wrong direction. In the low collisionality regime pitch-angle scattering is sufficient to accurately describe impurity transport through self-interaction, but lacks the ability to describe inter-species interaction. We also use SFINCS to analyze how the impurity content affects the neoclassical impurity dynamics and the bootstrap current. We show that a change in plasma effective charge Zeff of order unity can affect the bootstrap current enough to cause a deviation in the divertor strike point locations.